In this the second STI podcast of 2021, we focus on the HIV epidemic in Indonesia and how the country strives to meet the UNAIDS 90-90-90 UNAIDS sustainability goals for people living with HIV (PLWH). Episode Highlights: Indonesia is a densely populated country spread over 17,000 islands of stunning beauty. It has one of the […]
Category: Epidemiology
COVID-19 and HIV: Calling attention to the importance of ensuring HIV status and testing is included in the management of COVID-19
As health care services worldwide undergo major reconfiguration to respond to the coronavirus crisis, there are simple and affordable ways to improve outcomes that relate to both HIV and COVID-19 care. The first step is to make sure that the HIV status is recorded on all hospital admissions relating to COVID-19. This in turn will […]
Does Scripture support HIV prevention? Meeting the challenge of HIV in the African-American population.
African-Americans comprise 12% of the US population, but, as of 2016, accounted for 44% of the estimated 40,000 new HIV diagnoses. 58% of the African-Americans diagnosed with HIV were black MSM. Statistics such as these, drawn from the 2016 CDC HIV Surveillance Report, are the basis of a recent ‘Decade Call to Action’ (Laurencin & […]
Can we use online search query data to predict the next syphilis outbreak?
Considerable stir has been generated by Young & Aral (Y&A) in a recent modelling study claiming to have demonstrated the potential of Google online search data to identify and predict syphilis outbreaks. The application of digital technologies to the epidemiology of STIs, and of syphilis in particular, is nothing new (Simms & Petersen (STI)). The […]
Sexually transmitted infections are amongst the fastest spreading high-incidence notifiable diseases in China
Sexually transmitted infections emerge from a recent epidemiological study as a particularly pressing concern for Chinese public health at the present time. Yang & Li (Y&L) assess trends in incidence and mortality in 45 notifiable infectious diseases across China over the decade since the SARS tragedy in 2003 brought important changes in Chinese public health […]
‘Scoping’ location: the role of ‘place’/’space’ as an influence on HIV outcomes amongst young MSM
Bauermeister & Stephenson (B&S) is a scoping review addressing the impact of location – ‘space’ and ‘place’ – on HIV prevention and care outcomes for young MSM (YMSM). It owes much to Diaz & Ayala and their concern to view human behaviour in terms of ‘social location’ ‘within a context of social oppressive factors’ rather […]
Location of HIV-2 emergence determined by distribution of indigenous cultural practices of male circumcision
Sousa & Vandamme demonstrate a robust correlation between HIV-2 prevalence at the time of the 1980s surveys and the absence of indigenous practices of male circumcision earlier in the century. This is a complex and interdisciplinary study, involving some of the earliest large-scale, West African serological surveys of HIV-2 (1980s) and extensive ethnography of the […]
Prevention of anogenital cancers in women may be an additional benefit of HPV vaccination
Cervical cancer is evidently the most important, but by no means the only, health risk that vaccination against HPV aims to avert. The potential impact of vaccination on other cancers (not to mention genital warts) may also be a factor in estimating the cost benefit of achieving higher vaccination coverage, as well as determining priorities […]
Global patterns in ante-natal syphilis prevalence: Why is sub-Saharan Africa different?
‘Can a meaningful pattern be discerned in the large variations in syphilis rates over the last century?’ This is the question addressed by a recent systematic review – Kenyon & Tsoumanis (K&T) – based on published data on ante-natal syphilis prevalence (ASP) from those countries for which that data is available since at least 1951. […]
Where next for HIV prevention in New Zealand?
A recent issue of the New Zealand Medical Journal (NZMJ) (128: vol. 1426) gives pride of place to a series of papers that reconsider the way forward for HIV prevention in New Zealand (NZ) against the background of the past thirty years. Recent contributions to STI journal by these authors analyse the behavioural surveillance data […]