The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has awarded a $1.36 million grant to the International Foundation for Education and Self-Help (IFESH) to continue HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention projects under the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief in the Rivers and Imo States of Nigeria through March of 2010.

The grant will fund 100 percent of IFESH's "HIV Prevention, Care and Support, and Confidential Counseling and Testing" project, which focuses mainly on poor, rural women and their families and also orphans and vulnerable children. The project's preventative services promote abstinence, monogamy and the use of condoms, and its medical services provide expectant mothers with anti-retroviral medication to prevent the virus from spreading to their children. The project also provides individuals and their families with therapeutic, economic, psycho-social and other risk-reduction support.

IFESH is able to maximize the effectiveness of its programs through using a holistic, community-based approach in rural areas where HIV/AIDS prevalence rates sometimes nearly double that of Nigeria's 4.4 percent.

Between October 2007 and September 2008, the project enabled IFESH to provide HIV testing services to about 20,000 persons in underserved rural communities including 10,000 pregnant women. Over 1,000 HIV positive men and women have benefited from care and support services provided under the project.

An example of an individual helped by this project is a 22-year old wife and new mother who was diagnosed as being HIV-positive. After revealing her status, her husband abused her and her family asked her not to return to her hometown. She sought the services of IFESH where she received anti-retroviral treatment, joined a support group, and received counseling, financial and nutritional support for her baby. Today, she has a home and a career in hairdressing and her son tested negative for HIV.

"We are really grateful for the financial support we receive from the CDC that makes our HIV/AIDS activities in Nigeria possible," said Dr. Julie H. Sullivan, IFESH President and CEO. "Because of this, thousands of women, their unborn children and their families receive essential life-saving services," she said. "Our project objectives are to educate young people, thus enabling them to make informed decisions, to encourage voluntary, confidential HIV testing and to provide counseling to those who are already infected so they do not knowingly infect others."

July 20, 2009