Ingen sex eller sikker sex i en måned kan bremse spredningen af hiv, mener hiv-forskeren Alan Whiteside
JOHANNESBURG, 9 November 2010 (PlusNews): An aggressive national campaign to persuade people to abstain from sex or commit to 100 per cent condom use for a month could make a significant contribution to hiv prevention efforts, says a leading hiv expert.
Alan Whiteside of the Health Economics and hiv/aids Research Division (HEARD) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal is trying to get the aids community talking about this and other innovative strategies to curtail hiv.
Addressing delegates at the Third hiv/aids in the Workplace Research Conference in Johannesburg on Tuesday, Whiteside pointed out that in countries such as Swaziland, where nearly 50 percent of women aged 25-29 are hiv-positive, past prevention efforts have failed catastrophically.
In an article published in the April 2010 issue of the Southern African Journal of hiv Medicine, Whiteside and his co-author Justin Parkhurst of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine argued that a national “safe sex/no sex month” could help reduce the spread of hiv by skipping the period immediately after an individual acquires the virus when they are most infectious. Models estimate that about 10 to 45 per cent of hiv infections result from sex with people in this “acute infection” period.
Whiteside believes the clear time-frame for the intervention makes it an easier sell. It could also be adapted to suit the needs of different populations. For example, in a country where new infections appear to be driven by sex work, a month of “no commercial sex work” or a “month of monogamy” might make sense.
“My understanding is that this is something Swaziland is going to pick up and run with,” Whiteside said, adding that the country’s small, homogeneous population and its traditional and very influential leadership made it the ideal place to try a safe sex/no sex month.
“Why wait?” he asked. “It can’t do any harm and we’ll know in nine months [from the number of pregnancies] whether it worked or not.”
