Circumcision, fewer sex partners the key to curbing HIV
Date: Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Source: The Mercury (South Africa)
Author: Anso Thom
Top researchers have called for male circumcision and the reduction of multiple sexual partnerships to become the cornerstone of HIV prevention in Africa if a significant impact is to be made on the HIV epidemic.
Policy analysis led by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health and the University of California, Berkeley, found that the most common HIV prevention strategies - condom promotion, HIV testing, treatment of other sexually transmitted infections, vaccine and microbicide research and abstinence were having a limited impact on the predominantly heterosexual epidemics found in Africa.
The researchers also said some of the assumptions underlying such strategies such as poverty or war being major causes of Aids in Africa were unsupported by rigorous scientific evidence.
"Two interventions currently getting less attention and resources - male circumcision and reducing multiple sexual partnerships - would have a greater impact on the Aids pandemic and should become the cornerstone of HIV prevention efforts in the high HIV prevalence parts of Africa," the researchers argue.
The research paper appeared in the journal Science last week.
"Despite relatively large investments in Aids prevention efforts for some years now, including sizeable spending in some of the most heavily affected countries (such as South Africa and Botswana), it's clear that we need to do a better job of reducing the rate of new HIV infections. We need a fairly dramatic shift in priorities, not just a minor tweaking," said Daniel Halperin, lecturer on international health in the Harvard School of Public Health's department of population and international health and one of the paper's lead authors.
The AIDS pandemic continues to devastate some populations worldwide.
In most countries, HIV transmission remains concentrated among prostitutes, men who have sex with men and/or injecting drug users and their sexual partners.
In many parts of Africa, especially sub-Saharan Africa, HIV has jumped outside these high-risk groups, creating generalised epidemics spread mainly among people who are having multiple and typically concurrent (overlapping, longer-term) sexual relationships.
In nine countries in southern Africa, more than 12% of adults are infected with HIV.
The authors said the current widely used prevention strategies, while having value in some instances, were not as effective at preventing HIV transmission as male circumcision and reducing multiple sexual partners and thus should not continue to receive the bulk of donor investments for prevention, especially in Africa.
They cited the example of Thailand where condom use was widely promoted as an HIV prevention measure and was effective as the epidemic was spread primarily through prostitution.
"However, studies have found no evidence that condom use has played a primary role in HIV decline in generalised, primarily heterosexual epidemics, such as those in southern Africa," the authors said.
This was mainly because most HIV transmission there occured in more regular sexual relationships, in which achieving consistent condom use had proved extremely difficult.
"The evidence is similarly lacking for other popular prevention approaches as well," Halperin and his nine co-authors said.
Studies had shown no consistent reduction in risk for those testing HIV-negative and testing programmes had produced no evidence of HIV reduction in populations.
"The treatment of other STIs (sexually transmitted infections) has had discouraging results; vaccine development trials and microbicide testing have been disappointing; and abstinence is not likely to have a major impact since most HIV infections occur among people in their 20s or older, when most are already sexually active."
The authors pointed out that, in contrast, many studies in the past two decades had shown that male circumcision significantly reduced the risk of heterosexual HIV infection.
In west Africa, where male circumcision was widespread, the prevalence of HIV remained relatively low.
When initial findings from three recent randomised controlled trials of male circumcision in Africa showed at least a 60% reduction in HIV risk, the trials were stopped early because it was not ethical to withhold the clearly proven benefits of this simple surgical procedure.
"It is tragic that we did not act on male circumcision in 2000, when the evidence was already very compelling. Large numbers of people will die as a result of this error," said Malcolm Potts, co-lead author and Bixby professor of population and family planning at the University of California Berkeley School of Public Health.
Similarly, partner reduction appeared to have played a primary role in reducing HIV rates in Uganda, Kenya, Zimbabwe and Cote d'Ivoire, as well as in urban Malawi and Ethiopia.
Uganda's Zero Grazing campaign, initiated in 1987, indicated that reducing partners could be achieved on a large scale as later surveys revealed that the number of people reporting multiple and casual partners declined by more than half.
"The political fight in the United States between supporters of condoms and supporters of abstinence has obscured the importance of what is arguably the most powerful of what are known as the three ABC strategies (abstinence, be faithful, condoms), which is the B, or partner reduction and fidelity aspect," according to the paper's authors.
The authors also argued that HIV prevention priorities needed to shift significantly to reflect the best available scientific evidence. They noted that only 1% of total prevention funding requested by the United Nations Aids programme was earmarked for male circumcision, and that reducing multiple sexual partnerships would probably garner only a small fraction of community mobilisation.
The vast majority of donor investments in HIV prevention in the generalised epidemics of Africa continued to go to approaches for which the evidence of actual impact was increasingly unclear, said Halperin. - Health-e News Service
|
