Worldwide, about 35 million people are living with HIV. The World Health Organization and the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS plan to use an approach called “treatment as prevention” to eliminate the global pandemic, which the WHO says will have occurred when only one person out of 1,000 becomes infected each year. (more…)
New York City continues to battle an HIV epidemic, including among drug users. There are many possible interventions. Researchers have developed a sophisticated predictive computer model to help policymakers figure out which interventions, or combinations of interventions, would have the most meaningful impact.
Brandon Marshall, assistant professor of epidemiology at Brown University, has led the simulation effort ever since he was a postdoctoral scholar at Columbia University. In a new paper in the March edition of the journal Health Affairs a team from Brown and Columbia published the results of the simulation, which projects that New York can significantly reduce new infections among drug users by 2040 by implementing certain combinations of interventions. Marshall spoke with David Orenstein about what the predictive computer model shows. (more…)
The history of women with HIV/AIDS in the United States is really a story of racial and ethnic health disparities.
Overall, the rate of American women contracting the disease relative to men has climbed from 8 percent in the 1980s to 25 percent today. But most of this burden is in underserved communities: one in 32 African-American women will be diagnosed with HIV in their lifetime, as will one in 106 Latina women. Meanwhile, one in 526 Caucasian and Asian women will contract the virus. Death rates are also higher for African-American and Latina women, making it one of the leading causes of death for those groups. (more…)
Clean Syringes Often Unavailable in St. Petersburg, YSPH Research Finds
Russia’s HIV epidemic is among the fastest growing in the world and injection drug users who often share needles and other supplies are hardest hit. This occurs even though pharmacies are a legal source for clean syringes and can sell them without restriction.
A recent study led by the Yale School of Public Health and St. Petersburg State University mapped the city’s 965 pharmacies and compared their locations and density to HIV prevalence at the district level. (more…)
UCLA study challenges World Health Organization’s approach
The World Health Organization is about to roll out a new strategy for AIDS prevention in South Africa, a country where more than 5 million people are infected with HIV. Based on a mathematical model, the WHO predicts this strategy will completely eliminate HIV in South Africa within a decade.
But not so fast, suggests a group of UCLA researchers. Their work challenges the proposed strategy by showing it could lead to several million individuals developing drug-resistant strains of HIV. And further, they say, it will cost billions of dollars more than the WHO has estimated. (more…)
