Back to Annual Meeting

Back to Annual Meeting

APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

Recorded presentation

Ron Stall, PhD, Department of Community and Behavioral Health, University of Pittsburgh, Graduate School of Public Health, 130 DeSoto St., Pittsburgh, PA 15261, 412-383-7244, rstall@pitt.edu

Biomedical approaches to the control and management of HIV have been the approach most favored by funding agencies. This emphasis has great appeal: biomedical approaches to controlling HIV infection have added years, if not decades, of life to HIV positive people in post-industrial countries and have given hope for survival for tens of millions of HIV positive people in the developing world. That said, the track record of biomedical approaches to controlling HIV within high risk populations in terms of access and uptake has been mixed at best. The primary reasons for this mixed level of success have to do with intractable sociocultural barriers that are not resolvable via bench science advances. Even after a quarter century of AIDS there remains no magic bullet in sight to control the epidemic: future advances to control the epidemic will necessarily include strong behavioral and cultural interventions to facilitate the use of any biomedical advances that may emerge in the future.

Learning Objectives: