By Nicolas Wilhelm, JD Scott County, Indiana, which only has a few thousand residents, has historically had an average of five HIV cases per year. Since December 2014, however, the county has seen an outbreak, with more than 140 newly diagnosed cases. Dr. Jonathan Mermin, the director of the National Center for HIV/AIDs, Viral Hepatitis,…
The research assistant will work with the principal investigator Nir Eyal and collaborators from the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, Duke University, Massachusetts General Hospital, and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital as well as the ACTG HIV trial site network. The multidisciplinary team uses methods of clinical epidemiology, economics, simulation modeling, and normative theory…
On Wednesday, South African Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi announced that, as of January 2015, HIV-positive patients in the country would start receiving free antiretroviral treatment once their CD4 count fell below 500, instead of current threshold of less than 350. Some patient groups would start receiving antiretrovirals immediately upon being diagnosed with HIV infection, regardless…
High hopes for overcoming the HIV epidemic rest to a large extent on HIV Treatment-as-Prevention (TasP). Large cluster-randomized controlled trials are currently under way to test the effectiveness of different TasP strategies in general populations in sub-Saharan Africa. At the same time, however, international antiretroviral treatment (ART) guidelines have already moved to definitions of ART…
By Scott Burris In documenting how often public health law research does influence legislation, I’ve used syringe exchange programs as an example of evidence NOT guiding policy. Despite the consensus in health research that increasing access to sterile syringes has helped reduce HIV, state drug paraphernalia laws, and pharmacy regulations remain a barrier, as does…
By Suzanne M. Rivera How to Survive a Plague is a moving chronicle of the onset of the AIDS epidemic as seen through the lens of the activists who mobilized to identify and make available the effective treatments we have today. Beginning at the start of the epidemic, when little was known about the HIV…
By Scott Burris The concept of “overcriminalization” is gaining traction across the political spectrum. The Heritage Foundation, which has a website devoted to the phenomenon, defines it as “the trend in America – and particularly in Congress – to use the criminal law to ‘solve’ every problem, punish every mistake (instead of making proper use…
