RTI International - News Release - 9.18.2009

RTI Experts' Research Featured at 2009 AIDS Impact Conference in Botswana

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C.—In a special session titled "Vulnerable Women and Global Efforts," HIV/AIDS experts from RTI International will present their research and findings at the 2009 AIDS Impact Conference in Gaborone, Botswana (September 22–25). The session will highlight novel strategies to reduce women's vulnerability to HIV/AIDS.

More than 25 years into the HIV/AIDS epidemic, women are rapidly becoming the face of the pandemic. Women in sub-Saharan Africa are among the most affected by HIV/AIDS, representing 61 percent of infections among adults in the region. It is estimated that 75 percent of all women living with HIV are in sub-Saharan Africa.

Women in other parts of the world are also at increased risk of HIV infection. In Asia, HIV prevalence has increased rapidly and infection rates among women appear to be increasing more rapidly than among men. In this region, women represent between 22 percent and 33 percent of adults living with HIV/AIDS. Among young people aged 15 to 24, women comprise between 25 percent and 40 percent of people infected with HIV.

In the United States, HIV/AIDS affects African Americans disproportionately. Despite representing less than 13 percent of the U.S. population, African Americans constituted 51 percent of the new HIV/AIDS cases in 2007. African American women account for an increasing proportion of these cases and they are almost 23 times as likely to be diagnosed with AIDS as White women.

These alarming facts speak to the need for culturally appropriate, gender-specific interventions that address HIV risk among vulnerable women in diverse settings and are guided by prevailing regional and local conditions.

This session (scheduled for Thursday, September 24) will feature four presentations on innovative, gender-specific, HIV prevention intervention projects around the world. It will be led by Wendee Wechsberg, Ph.D., senior director of RTI's Substance Abuse Treatment Evaluations and Interventions program.

Two presentations will address international adaptations of the "best-evidence" Women's CoOp intervention, an HIV behavioral intervention developed in the United States that has demonstrated success in Gauteng Province and the Western Cape Province, South Africa. One presentation will focus on vulnerable teenage girls in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, and one will address gender-based violence in India.

• "Adapting an Evidence-Based Woman-Focused HIV Prevention Intervention for Vulnerable Women in Multiple Settings"—presented by Wendee Wechsberg et al.
• "The Western Cape Women's Health CoOp Study: Formative Research to Randomized Controlled Trial"—presented by Felicia Browne et al.
• "Patriarchy, Poverty, and Power: Agency and Sexuality Among Teenage Girls in the Eastern Cape and Implications for Prevention"—presented by Rachel Jewkes et al.
• "Mitigating Women's Vulnerability to Gender-Based Violence and HIV by Focusing on Informal Social Networks: Insights from India"—presented by Suneeta Krishnan et al.

In addition, Suneeta Krishnan, Ph.D., of RTI's Women's Global Health Imperative will participate in a panel presentation and give a plenary talk on "Gender, HIV, and Human Rights."