{"id":29,"date":"2005-02-15T12:19:02","date_gmt":"2005-02-15T17:19:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/politicshiv\/2005\/02\/15\/hiv-outreach-and-prevention-effor"},"modified":"2005-02-15T12:19:02","modified_gmt":"2005-02-15T17:19:02","slug":"hiv-outreach-and-prevention-efforts-a-mixed-bag","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/politicshiv\/2005\/02\/15\/hiv-outreach-and-prevention-efforts-a-mixed-bag\/","title":{"rendered":"HIV outreach and prevention efforts a mixed bag"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a name='a48'><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2005\/02\/15\/health\/15beha.html?partner=rssnyt\">More on HIV prevention, in the wake of last week&#8217;s announcemen<\/a>t.&nbsp; It&#8217;s not encouraging, to say the least.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>A nationwide team of researchers and public health workers recently<br \/>\ncompleted perhaps the most ambitious effort to reduce H.I.V.<br \/>\ntransmission rates among high-risk gay men. The Explore project, as it<br \/>\nis known, followed 4,295 sexually active men in six American cities who<br \/>\nwere H.I.V. negative when the study started in 1999. Half the men<br \/>\nreceived 10 sessions of one-on-one counseling, intended to drive home<br \/>\nthe dangers of risky sex and to provide practical strategies for<br \/>\navoiding it. The other half received two visits a year from a health<br \/>\nclinic worker who discussed risk reduction.<\/p>\n<p>The results,<br \/>\npublished last summer, fell short of expectations. After a year, the<br \/>\nrate of new H.I.V. infections was 18 percent lower in the group who had<br \/>\ncounseling, and these men were about 20 percent less likely than the<br \/>\nothers to have had sex with a partner whose H.I.V. status was unknown.<br \/>\nBut after two years, the differences between the two groups vanished.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We<br \/>\nhad a strong initial effect, but it just didn&#8217;t last,&#8221; said Dr. Thomas<br \/>\nJ. Coates, an infectious disease specialist at the University of<br \/>\nCalifornia, Los Angeles and a lead author of the study. <\/p>\n<p>Earlier<br \/>\nstudies were even less encouraging: one found that men who received<br \/>\nbehavioral counseling were more likely to catch a sexually transmitted<br \/>\ndisease than those who did not get the special therapy.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>More on HIV prevention, in the wake of last week&#8217;s announcement.&nbsp; It&#8217;s not encouraging, to say the least. A nationwide team of researchers and public health workers recently completed perhaps the most ambitious effort to reduce H.I.V. transmission rates among high-risk gay men. The Explore project, as it is known, followed 4,295 sexually active men [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":709,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1106],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-epidemiology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/politicshiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/politicshiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/politicshiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/politicshiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/709"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/politicshiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/politicshiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/politicshiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/politicshiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/politicshiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}