HIV This Week Issue #97

Welcome to the 97th issue of HIV This Week!  In this issue, we cover the following topics:

1. Gender based violence

• Gender inequality norms, rape, and HIV risk: high time for legislative change in Botswana and Swaziland
• Pro wife-beating attitudes are a red flag identifying men trapped in maladaptive masculinities in Rwanda

2. Economics

• Streams of economic benefits offset treatment costs in low- and middle-income countries and generate excellent returns on investment

3. Microbicides

• Everything you need to know in the lead up to the Microbicides 2012 conference in Australia

4. Post-exposure prophylaxis

• Guidelines for PEPSE (PEP following Sexual Exposure) in the United Kingdom

5. Basic Science

• The fascinating origins of the HIV pandemic

6. Injecting drug use

• Women who inject drugs at modestly higher HIV risk than men in high HIV prevalence settings
• Implications of ecological evidence of reduced ‘community viral load’ following antiretroviral treatment roll-out to people who inject drugs

7. Epidemiology

• Couple serodiscordancy patterns in sub-Saharan Africa can inform prevention programming
• Adjusted BED estimates: can mathematics really make HIV incidence determination simpler?

8. Treatment

• Early mortality (death in the first year of antiretroviral treatment) is highest in sub-Saharan Africa, followed by Asia, and the Americas

9. Non-subtype B infection

• Subtype A is the least aggressive: could subtyping play a role in clinical management in the future?
• Would CCR5 antagonists like maraviroc work in India, Uganda, and South Africa: which co-receptor (CCR5, CXCR4) are non-subtype B viruses attracted to (tropism)?

10. Pre-exposure prophylaxis

• What would happen to HIV transmission and drug resistance in Botswana if pre-exposure prophylaxis programmes were introduced?

11. Research conduct

• Challenges posed by non-inferiority designs for trials of new HIV prevention technologies
• Good practice case study of knowledge translation and exchange (KTE) with adolescent survey participants in South Africa

12. Health care delivery

• Listening to health care workers: ideas on how to improve PMTCT services in Uganda
• How competing risk of death affects estimates of loss to follow-up in antiretroviral treatment programmes in Zambia and Switzerland

13. Adolescents

• Adolescents at a Cape Town community-based antiretroviral therapy clinic have better immune responses despite less virus suppression
• Low levels of HIV knowledge among street adolescents in rehab centres in Kinshasa

14. Preventing new paediatric infections

• Quality of antenatal care also affects PMTCT coverage in the PEARL study in Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire, South Africa and Zambia
• The weak link in preventing paediatric infection: HIV acquisition during pregnancy and breastfeeding and what can be done about it.

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Cate Hankins, Chief Scientific Adviser to UNAIDS

Sylvia Béké-Wilson, Assistant

Creative Consulting & Development Works, Research Consultants