A University of Brighton professor has been appointed to advise a World Health Organisation (WHO) project aimed at ensuring people have access to high-quality tests for sexually transmitted infections (STIs).
The temporary appointment will see Professor Nigel Sherriff, the University’s Professor of Public Health and Public Promotion, assisting the ‘Sexually Transmitted Infection Point-of-care Testing’ (ProSPeRo) study, established by the WHO’s Reproductive Health and Research Department of World Health Organisation, to evaluate and implement low-cost point-of-care tests (POCTs).
This follows a year of data collection involving the recruitment of men who have sex with men (MSM) who presented at the Sexual Health and Contraception Service at the Royal Sussex County Hospital in Brighton.
He and colleagues looked at POCT duo tests that can test for HIV and syphilis at the same time among MSM attending the clinic, and then seeing how well the tests compared to gold-standard reference testing.
Professor Sherriff, Deputy Head of the University’s School of Health Sciences (Research and Enterprise) and from the University’s Centre for Transforming Sexuality and Gender, said: “We pooled our data with data from around the world to generate the largest-ever data set on this issue to ultimately validate the use of these tests which can be particularly useful in resources-poor settings for identifying new infections without the need for expensive laboratory confirmation testing.”
Professor Sherriff will be attending a global technical meeting in December in the Italian city of Verona on POCTs for STIs in 15 countries covering 21 research sites including Brighton.
For more on Professor Sherriff, visit:
For more on the WHO’s Department of Reproductive Health and Research, visit:
