AIDS and behavior
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Socioeconomic costs of HIV and TB and the difficulty of maintaining optimal treatment are well documented. Social protection measures such as food assistance may be required to offset some of the treatment related costs as well as to ensure food security and maintain good health of the affected individual and household. ⋯ Eight of ten studies found that provision of food can improve adherence and/or treatment completion for HIV care and treatment, ART and TB-DOTS. This indicates that food provision is not only a biological, but also a behavioural intervention, and underscores that unresolved food insecurity can be an impediment to treatment adherence and consequently to good treatment outcomes.
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Although HIV self-testing may overcome some barriers to HIV testing, various stakeholders have expressed concerns that HIV self-testing may lead to unintended harm, including psychological, social and medical harm. Recognizing that similar concerns were raised in the past for some other self-tests, we conduct a review of the literature on a set of self-tests that share some characteristics with HIV self-tests to determine whether there is any evidence of harm. We find that although the potential for harm is discussed in the literature on self-tests, there is very little evidence that such harm occurs.
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The health consequences for HIV-affected families of insufficient access to safe water and sanitation are particularly dire: inadequate access complicates medication adherence and increases vulnerability to opportunistic infections for persons living with HIV. The gendered nature of water collection and HIV care--with women disproportionately bearing the burden in both areas--presents an unrealized opportunity to improve HIV outcomes through investments in water/sanitation. ⋯ Drawing on theories of gender and systems science, we posit that there are multiple paths through which improved water/sanitation could improve HIV-related outcomes. Our findings suggest that the positive synergies of investing in water/sanitation in high HIV prevalence communities that are also expanding access to ART would be significant, with health multiplying effects that impact women and entire communities.
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Twenty-three U. S. states currently have laws that make it a crime for persons who have HIV to engage in various sexual behaviors without, in most cases, disclosing their HIV-positive status to prospective sex partners. ⋯ This article demonstrates how HIV disclosure laws disregard or discount the effectiveness of universal precautions and safer sex, criminalize activities that are central to harm reduction efforts, and offer, as an implicit alternative to risk reduction and safer sex, a disclosure-based HIV transmission prevention strategy that undermines public health efforts. The article also describes how criminal HIV disclosure laws may work against the efforts of public health leaders to reduce stigmatizing attitudes toward persons living with HIV.