HIV Prevention
New Posting by Daniel Halperin
Hello folks,
Ok, for the first of my occasional postings and comments at this new “space” on GHDonline, here goes!:
1) On Tuesday (June 29th), from 9:00 to 11:00 am, Eastern Daylight Time, a debate will be held at the World Bank in Washington, DC, with 4 experts arguing for and against the proposition that: “Behavior change in generalized epidemics has not reduced new HIV infections and is an unwise use of HIV prevention resources.” For those in the DC area, although the official deadline for registration was yesterday, apparently they may still be able to take registrations. This is actually the second in a series of debates organized by the World Bank and USAID on “Emerging Issues in Today’s HIV Response.” (The first one, held last month, was an interesting debate on the “test and treat” proposition for HIV prevention in Africa.) FYI there are 3 ways to join in these debates:
a. By going in person to the World Bank Headquarters in the J building, 701-18th St NW, Conference Room JB1-080, Washington DC.
b. Via live webcast, at http://worldbankva.na4.acrobat.com/wbusaid/
c. By attending a videoconference site are various places throughout the world. (The debate will be from 15:00 to 17:00 hours Central African Time. Email to find out the various sites in Africa.)
The Moderator will again be Willard Cates, Jr., MD, MPH, President of Research, Family Health International. The Panelists will be:
- Myron Cohen, MD, Associate Vice Chancellor; J. Herbert Bate Distinguished Professor, Medicine, Microbiology and Immunology, and Public Health; Director, UNC Institute of Global Health and Infectious Disease; Chief, Division of Clinical Infectious Diseases,
- Daniel Low-Beer, PhD, Unit Director for Performance, Effectiveness and Impact, The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria,
- James Shelton, MD, MPH, Science Advisor, Bureau for Global Health, USAID,
- Francois Venter, FCP (SA), Senior Director, HIV Management Cluster, Reproductive Health and HIV Research Unit; Associate Professor, Department of Medicine, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa
2) There was an interesting (front page) article in The New York Times last month on South Africa’s HIV prevention fight, showcasing President Zuma’s endorsement of male circumcision:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/15/world/africa/15zuma.html?scp=2&sq=Zuma&st=cs
3) Another journalistic article on the newly (again) hot issue of “HIV-AIDS Exceptionalism” seemed to me unusually balanced (for this topic):
http://www.miller-mccune.com/health/the-aids-funding-dilemma-16202/#
4) Along somewhat similar lines, this recent journal article on “Is there an association between PEPFAR funding and improvement in national health indicators in Africa? A retrospective study”:
http://www.jiasociety.org/content/13/1/21
5) This was also just published, on sexual networks in the interesting Malawi island research site (“The Likoma Network Study: Context, data collection, and initial results”):
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2825888/?tool=pubmed
6) This (brief) article by Jon Cohen in ScienceInsider raised some interesting doubts over the significance of the “successful” RV-144 AIDS vaccine trial in Thailand:
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2009/10/unrevealed-anal.html#
(And FYI when those apparently promising AIDS vaccine results were announced last year, one of the first things that some of us wondered about was the "as treated" analysis. FYI/as many of you probably recall, the opposite scenario happened with the male circumcision trials. In the Kenya and Uganda trials the initial, "per protocol" reduction in HIV was about 50%, but the actual "as treated" analysis revealed a higher level of protection. (In the South Africa trial, the published finding was 60% risk reduction, but the as treated effect was 76%. You can see a brief comment on this by Jim Shelton at:
http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/j...
7) Here’s another good (and also very short) article on that vaccine trial (published in Nature):
http://www.nature.com/news/2009/091026/full/4611187a.html
8) Finally, this recent paper on population-level prevention dynamics (related to ARV coverage) in my hometown of San Francisco:
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0011068
Cheers everyone!
Daniel
