Category: Department of Infectious Disease

“Why am I depressed, doc?” Experiences of an HIV clinician and researcher

HIV Stop Stigma

Despite major progress in treatment and prevention, being diagnosed with HIV can have a big emotional impact on individuals. People with HIV have higher rates of mental health problems than those seen in the general population. One reason for this may be HIV-related stigma, explains Professor Alan Winston from the Department of Infectious Disease. 

Since the late 1990s, I have been treating people living with HIV and been involved in HIV clinical research. Many things we read about HIV are success stories, and quite rightly we should celebrate these tremendous scientific and medical advances. Life expectancy for someone with HIV is now similar to that of the general population. Antiretroviral therapy generally has manageable side effects and for most individuals, does not incur that many tablets per day. Indeed, many HIV treatments involve taking only one tablet per day. So, why then do so many people with HIV suffer from depression, other mental health conditions, and a poorer quality of life? 

Experience in clinic 

Most people living with HIV, once on a stable treatment, will attend their treatment centre twice per year. Often appointments rotate between a consultant or medical doctor once per year and a nurse specialist on the other occasion. As we can’t cure HIV, our patients attend for life, and we get to know them very well. At consultations, in addition to routine monitoring, we ask people how they are keeping. What stands out are the number of individuals who report symptoms of depression and other mental health conditions such as anxiety. Whilst many of us suffer from mental health complaints, the burden of these complaints in people living with HIV is very high. Thankfully, we do have help in clinic and have a specific clinic run by a psychiatry nurse specialist we can refer patients to. 

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“Research is very much a team effort and I see this award as a reflection of that.” – Dr Felicity Fitzgerald, 2023 Simon Newell Award winner

Dr Felicity Fitzgerald

Dr Felicity Fitzgerald (who volunteered clinically during the West African Ebola outbreak) has been selected as the winner of the 2023 Simon Newell Award for her work in Zimbabwe to improve recognition and outcomes of newborns with suspected sepsis. Dr Fitzgerald spoke to the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) about her research and tips for aspiring researchers.

The Simon Newell Award Recognises an outstanding young medically qualified researcher in British paediatrics. Each year, with support from GOSH Charity and Sparks, RCPCH offer the prestigious award of £2,000 to one early independent researcher in paediatrics.

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Is an H5N1 ‘bird flu’ pandemic inevitable?

The largest ever outbreak of bird flu is spilling over into mammals, including foxes and otters in the UK. Could this transmission see a jump to humans? Dr Thomas Peacock from the Department of Infectious Disease discusses.

Avian influenza virus has been featured prominently in the news again over the past few months. Headlines urge vaccine stockpiling, show images of beaches covered in dead sea birds or seals, or people in hazmat suits carrying bin bags full of dead birds or mink. Three years into the COVID-19 pandemic, is another pandemic unavoidable?

We have been in this situation before, back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, headlines spoke of ‘bird flu’ – H5N1 viruses ancestral to the ones currently circulating in Europe – as the inevitable coming pandemic. In fact, in 2009 an influenza pandemic did occur, but rather than the deadly H5N1 bird flu, it was caused by an obscure swine influenza virus that passed onto humans and caused the 2009 ‘swine flu’ pandemic.

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World AIDS Day: We have come a very long way but there is still much to do to protect those at risk

Professor Sarah Fidler

This festive period Three Wise Women from the Faculty of Medicine will be giving us the gift of wisdom.

While HIV is no longer the death sentence that it once was, lifelong treatment is still required and there is no cure – yet. Professor Sarah Fidler from the Department of Infectious Disease discusses how a new type of HIV treatment holds promise as a longer-lasting alternative to current complex drug regimens.

Despite extraordinary political and medical advances, HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, remains one of the world’s most serious public health challenges. Since its discovery in 1983 by researchers at the Pasteur Institute in France, 84 million people worldwide are estimated to have become HIV-positive and 40 million people have died from an HIV-related illness. Today, there are around 38 million people living with HIV globally, with 1.5 million new infections in 2021.

Advocacy and close collaboration between clinicians, scientists and the HIV-affected community has inspired and driven the research and drug development and access agenda. Without these close working relationships, the development of HIV treatments would have been markedly slower and many more lives would have been lost.

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Can we save lives by deliberately infecting people?

A person's arm being injected

In the middle of the pandemic, scientists intentionally infected healthy volunteers with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. John Tregoning, Reader in Respiratory Infections at the Department of Infectious Disease, explains why these experiments, and the volunteers who take part in them, are critical to modern medicine.

In early March 2021, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, a surprising-sounding set of experiments were taking place. Researchers at Imperial College London (and separately at the University of Oxford) were deliberately infecting healthy volunteers with SARS-CoV-2. This was in fact the latest in a long line of controlled human infection studies – where volunteers are deliberately infected with an infectious pathogen under extremely controlled conditions.

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Could we have a simple solution to this huge HIV problem?

Test tube of blood with a label written "HIV TEST"

There are currently 38 million people infected with HIV worldwide with up to a million deaths each year.  During National HIV Testing Week, we hear from Dr. Catherine Kibirige  who has developed a highly sensitive HIV-1 test that can detect a single infected cell with high precision.

Meet Dr. Fred Nsubuga, he manages the Diagnostics Laboratory at Jinja District Hospital in Uganda.  His laboratory is not equipped for HIV-1 treatment monitoring, so, when patients come in who need a viral load test, he must collect, process and store their blood samples, batch them together, then send them on a truck to the national HIV testing laboratory in Kampala, the capital city, 44 miles away.  Despite the availability of this state-of-the art facility which boasts a Roche Cobas 8800™ high-throughput instrument with a good computer-based laboratory management system, it can take months for the results to get back to him.  Sometimes, they go missing.  

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We need to give everyone, everywhere, the precious gift of health

Professor Faith Osier

This festive period Three Wise Women from the Faculty of Medicine will be giving us the gift of wisdom.

Professor Faith Osier shares her vision for health equity, from tackling vaccine inequity to empowering the next generation of scientists globally.

Almost a year ago to the day, my partner and I woke up our three young children in the middle of the night, readied them for the airport, hurriedly scrambled together the last of our belongings and embarked on a new adventure. We were moving from Heidelberg, a picture-perfect city that often made me feel like I was walking into a tranquil postcard. This had been home for four years and we kept our mixed feelings to ourselves as we ventured into the unknown, London. I was taking up a new position as the Executive Director of IAVI (formerly International AIDS Vaccine Initiative), at Imperial College London. We navigated the intricacies of relocating during lockdown, settled the children into school or rather “joyous home-learning” as was the case at the time, and I began to unpack my new job.

The mission of IAVI resonates strongly within me: “translating science into affordable, globally accessible public health solutions”. The opportunity to turn years of scientific endeavour into interventions that could transform the lives of the most vulnerable on our planet still springs me out of bed every day.  I have worked for over 25 years amongst the rural poor in Kilifi, Kenya, studied immune responses to malaria antigens in samples from similar study participants across Africa and appreciated first-hand the impact of ill-health on productivity, livelihoods and hope. (more…)

A social science approach to tackling antimicrobial resistance

This World Antimicrobial Awareness Week, Dr Esmita Charani discusses co-developing a Massive Open Online Course on how a social science perspective can fight the problem of antimicrobial resistance.

As part of an ESRC funded international research programme investigating antibiotic use in surgical care, we had the opportunity to collaborate with another ESRC funded research team at the University of Oxford to develop an e-learning course to share the learning from the methods we used and the findings of our work.

Partnering with the British Society for Antimicrobial Chemotherapy (BSAC), we developed a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), focusing on how we can use qualitative research to capture what challenges healthcare workers face in optimising antibiotic use in different countries. Working with our international collaborators and colleagues, we brought together a multidisciplinary expert faculty. (more…)

From Virology Master’s student to COVID-19 testing team leader

Recent graduate Samuel Badru is part of the lab team analysing samples for Imperial’s in-house Covid-19 testing scheme  – here he shares the steps to processing a successful test.

I would have never guessed that five months into studying a Master’s in Molecular Biology and Pathology of Viruses, the world would be stopped in its track on account of a virus. Lockdown descended on the nation two weeks into my project, which for me meant more bioinformatics from home and no more laboratory work. Little did I know that I would return to St Mary’s Campus’ laboratories to assist in the effort to combat the COVID-19 pandemic!

I joined the College’s in-house SARS-Cov-2 testing team in October 2020 – the day after my results day (which went well!). There are a number of steps to the testing workflow that definitely seemed overwhelming at first, but after more than two months in it is all pretty much second nature. (more…)

A letter to our taught students and their loved ones

This is an open letter from Mr Martin Lupton, Vice-Dean of Education to taught students in the Faculty of Medicine and their loved-ones.

Dear Students and their friends and families,

My eldest son has recently returned to University in the UK and, even though I work in both the health and education sector, I have to acknowledge that I have a certain level of anxiety about him. It is very difficult to read the news about all that has happened during this time of COVID and not to worry.

I am telling you this because I want you to understand that I have some inkling of what you may be feeling right now, particularly if you come from overseas or your daughter, son or relation, has just started their university life. The first thing I want to say is “Welcome to the Faculty of Medicine”. We are very proud of what we have achieved during this global pandemic; the Faculty of Medicine at Imperial College has been a key player contributing to the world’s understanding of the virus, the mapping of the virus, teaching people about the virus and developing a new vaccine. However, that is not all that we have been doing. (more…)