*EPF310 12/01/2004
Indian Professor in U.S. Studies HIV/AIDS-Drug Abuse Connection
(State Department funds Humphrey fellow's research on global problem) (1000)

By Julie Lippmann
Washington File Staff Writer

Washington -- Dr. Arun Kumar Sharma, a community medicine professor from India, is working with top medical minds in state-of-the-art facilities to address the connection between drug abuse and the spread of HIV/AIDS in a global context as part of a State Department-sponsored educational program.

Through the Hubert H. Humphrey Fellowship Program, Dr. Sharma has the opportunity to study and conduct research at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and to learn about the latest developments in the field from American and other Humphrey scholars.

"I am taking courses in the subject that I am already teaching there, and I can appreciate the difference in what we are teaching and where the science has progressed now, so I can take back that knowledge and utilize it in my country," he explained.

Dr. Sharma, an associate professor in the Department of Community Medicine and Public Health at the University of Delhi, was selected to participate in the ten-month program that encourages Fellows to take courses, develop themselves professionally by meeting with other researchers, and network to cultivate professional relationships with other scholars in his field.

Because of the experience, Sharma's view of community health issues has expanded from a localized vision to a more global understanding.

"[W]hat I knew about the problem of drug addiction in India, prior to coming here, is now added on with the problem of drug addition, for example, in the USA and [in the countries of] Fellows who are with me, from Brazil, from the East European countries, where drug abuse [and HIV are] becoming serious problems, so I am able to put things in the right perspective at the global level," he said.

In Delhi, Dr. Sharma teaches classes to undergraduate and graduate medical students in epidemiology, biostatistics, and a range of important health-related issues in India. However, while the breadth of classes he teaches is very broad, his research interests����drug abuse and HIV����are very focused.

"Drug abuse is a problem in India," he said, and while other issues take priority there, he said that the predictions indicate that HIV/AIDS will be a "a very big problem in the future."

Dr. Sharma seeks to address the complicated relationship between drug abuse and HIV/AIDS by looking less at data and more at individual human behavior, which, he said, can be changed by systematic methods, understanding the dynamics of an individual person, and working under a field of study called "social network analysis."

Social network analysis would look at a group of addicted, intravenous drug users who are more likely to share needles and are thus at a greater risk of getting HIV. At the same time, he explained, they may be sexually promiscuous and practicing unsafe sex. Through his research, Sharma is seeking to learn how people's sexual behavior relates to their drug use, and the likelihood of their sharing needles with others..

"I want to learn how to analyze that and then take [that] back and use it to understand how HIV is going to spread through the drug addicts in the community," he said.

Moving from quantitative to qualitative assessments of human behavior must happen for progress to be made in drug abuse and AIDS, said Sharma. But in a country as culturally, religiously, and socio-economically diverse as India, its politicians must customize their approach.

"[W]hat I want [is] that the scientific community should realize that these problems are truly addressed at the micro level. Each smaller group of people who has some cultural homogeneity has to have their problems addressed at their level. So the bottom-up approach, starting from the community and the people-level, and then going to formal, uniform policies at the higher level, is what's going to work. I want the scientific community to think from that perspective," he said.

The media also affect the way AIDS is characterized and approached, he said, and they tend to ignore the "health aspect" of drug abuse. Drug abuse is not an economic or political problem, he said, but a disease. It is important that journalists make the distinction because they have a very important role in disseminating the right kind of information, he said.

"[G]oing back home, I would like to address the issues to the media. [They] have to behave responsibly in bringing up the problem of drug abuse in its right sense -- and not only as the number of persons arrested and the number of persons getting killed," he said.

Dr. Sharma became interested in the intersection between drug abuse and AIDS research while working as an assistant professor at an Indian health center in 1996. A man walked into the clinic seeking dressing for the minor injuries on his hand. He told Dr. Sharma that he was HIV-positive, but after further inquiry, Sharma found the man only assumed he was infected, based upon media predictions, and wasn't able to produce a blood report to confirm that he was infected.

"I got curious," Sharma said, "and I got his blood examined in my own university's lab and I found that he was HIV-negative," he said. "He was a drug addict, so that's where I got interested in the subject and ever since then I [have been] looking at different aspects of drug addiction and HIV issues in Delhi and other areas."

While altering his perspective and approaches to research and community medicine issues, the opportunities he has had as a Humphrey Fellow have also challenged him to pro-actively address larger medical issues.

The experience, Sharma said, has inspired him to "take up bigger challenges in life and address the most difficult issues because it is possible to find a solution to them. This I learned after coming here. That we can take up such challenges and do something with them."

(The Washington File is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)

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