Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
as they have become known among AIDS experts (Associated Press
1997
; Carlin
2003
). They are a large group of educationally and economically disadvantaged
women from a slum called Majengo in Nairobi's Pumwani District, who resort to
commercial sex work to earn a living.
12
They have attracted the attention of the
international community since the early 1990s through their involvement with a
clinic originally established in the slum to study sexually transmitted diseases.
With the emergence of HIV, researchers wanted to find out if the virus could be
found among the women already involved in the studies. The clinic has now been
going for over 25 years and the cohort of research participants has been growing
steadily as staff and peer leaders have helped with the recruitment process.
13
,
14
5.3.1 The Research Projects
In the late 1980s, Canadian infectious disease scientist Francis Plummer first
noticed something perplexing
15
among a group of 2,000 Nairobi sex workers
enrolled in a study regarding sexually transmitted diseases (STDs).
16
Approximately 5% of these women had repeatedly tested negative for HIV infec-
tion, despite their high-risk behaviour (Bower
1998
), according to the research
team. Some of them had experienced hundreds of unprotected exposures to the
AIDS virus over a decade without showing any signs of HIV infection (d'Adesky
and Jeffreys
1999
). The researchers were interested in two main issues, as
described in an interview with a senior University of Nairobi scientist:
[O]ur interest at that particular time … was to really try and understand two things: …
how the immune system is behaving among women who are exposed to HIV and are not
getting infected … that was one … and the second interest was to look at those who are
already infected; what happens to HIV when these women get recurrent sexually transmit-
ted infections? So we were looking at viral loads, earlier on before many people started
doing viral load, and looking at when there is a STI [sexually transmitted infection] how
does the viral load behave?
17
12
See Andanda (
2009
) for a discussion of the women's vulnerability.
13
Interview with University of Nairobi researcher, GenBenefit, April 2007.
14
The interviews quoted in this chapter were conducted as part of the GenBenefit pro-
ject. Clearance was granted by the University of the Witwatersrand's Human Research Ethics
Committee (Non-medical), Protocol Number 61110, and the Kenya Medical Research Institute's
National Ethical Review Committee, reference number KEMRI/RES/7/3/1.
15
This phenomenon was first described by Plummer at an international AIDS conference in
Berlin in 1993 (Altman
1993
).
16
The cohort of female sex workers was established by Elizabeth Ngugi and colleagues from the
University of Nairobi and the University of Manitoba (see Jeffreys
2001
).
17
Interview with a University of Nairobi researcher, GenBenefit, April 2007.
