If one thing has been hammered home this week (and, indeed, over the past 25 years) regarding HIV/AIDS, it's that prevention is key. Treatments, while improving, are still a distant second place to preventing primary infection as far as the fight against AIDS goes, and a large portion of the world's HIV-infected population still has no access to these treatments. Prevention, therefore, is critical. And while the condom has become the symbol for HIV prevention, strategies go far beyond that tool.
Over at WebMD, they have a nice summary of many of the key points from this week's conference regarding prevention issues: 6 ways to prevent AIDS. I'll list them here briefly, but be sure to check out the article, which gives a bit more explanation:
(Continued at AIDS at 25)
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Hi Tara,
Thanks for brining the focus back to prevention. I was wondering if you have seen this paper PMID: 9117458. It suggests that the acute stage of HIV infection might be driving the epidemic and that prevention is most important in the acute stage before seroconversion. (Shameless plug: my graduate work attempts to extend that work by using phylogenetics on both real and simulated genetic sequence to study HIV transmission dynamics). Novel prevention techniques are only part of the picture, we should recall that infection dynamics can amplify or dampen the effects of any prevention modality. Have you considered making some post on basic concepts in infectious disease dynamics such as the basic reproductive number or basic dynamic models (SIR, SIS, etc...)? Pardon me if you have already discussed those topic on this blog. Thanks.
-ethan RS
p.s. non sequiter, I've been reading this blog for a few months now and I'm very impressed with the level headed approach you take to addressing people that disagree with you on this blog.
Hi ethan,
Yep, I've seen that paper. I know several of the authors from my post-doc at U of Michigan (one was even my advisor). I think the idea that the early stages of infection drive the epidemic is an intriguing hypothesis, and more work has been done on it since that paper, but of course that's a very difficult time to study in patients.
As far as posts on those topics, I've touched on modeling a bit while discussing specific papers (such as here and here), but never done a post on more of the basics of that subject. Probably would be a good idea....
I didn't know that you were at Michigan. I'm currently doing my PhD with Dr. Koopman and I worked with Dr. Foxman for my masters work. Small world.
I just realized that you gave a few lectures in Betsy's molecular epi class the semester that I had it. Glad to see that you are doing well. This is one of my favorite blogs, keep up the good work. And if you do decide to do any posts on infectious disease dynamics I would be happy to help in any way possible. Take care.
How funny; indeed I did. Would you be interested in writing a guest post on the topic, actually? Drop me an email if you think this would interest you--aetiology at gmail dot com.