In February 2007, a Welsh man was diagnosed with HIV at the Cardiff Royal Infirmary in Wales. So far, he was one amongst the 2500+ new HIV diagnoses in the UK that year. But he became the subject of scientific investigation when he reported 62 sexual encounters in the previous 6 months.
Of his first 9 sexual partners contacted by a team of researchers from the Cardiff Royal Infirmary interested in the transmission of HIV through sexual network, 5 turned out to be HIV positive. This did not mean that he …

“Women now account for half of the 33 million people living with HIV around the world. In sub-Saharan Africa, home to two-thirds of the world’s people living with HIV, women are even harder hit, making up 60 percent of those infected. Not only are women biologically more susceptible than men to HIV, many behavioral and social factors play into women’s vulnerability.
If a young woman is uninfected with HIV at the time of her marriage, traditional wisdom says that she has avoided the disease altogether. More and more, however, research shows …

Disco funerals or “Disco Matanga” in Swahili is a phenomenon observed in the municipality in Nyanza Province on the shores of Lake Victoria in Kenya, East Africa. These parties are organised at night, bring together the family of the deceased, their relatives, and are an important place for young people to hang out.
The phenomenon is poorly documented but in an article published in AIDS, Carolyne Njue and colleagues conducted 44 in-depth interviews with male and female adolescents aged 15–20 years in Kisumu and observed six disco funerals. They …

In a lengthy but rather well constructed and documented article published online in The East African, Curtis Abraham steers the charge against UNAIDS “for perpetuating the myth of condom effectiveness in Africa in the face of all evidence.”
Abraham rightly identifies that in a country like Uganda, the reduction in HIV incidence was not the result of condom-only prevention interventions (thanks to Helen Epstein for casting some light on the subject in her book “The Invisible Cure”) but was owning to behaviour changes and in particular partner-reduction campaigns such as that …

Kevin de Cock briefly admitted that the threat of an heterosexual AIDS pandemic outside of Africa had disappeared, but the pandemic is well and alive in Africa where it is affecting more and more heterosexual couples as observed in a study by Dr Kristin Dunkle and colleagues from the Emory Center for AIDS Research in the US and published in The Lancet.
The Atlanta team analysed Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) data from 1739 Zambian women, 540 Zambian men, 1176 Rwandan women, and 606 Rwandan men. Using various analyses models they …