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This study describes an education for development experience related to health and quality of life implemented in the framework of an on-going university cooperation action in Central America. A space for debate on these issues was created to support and promote the implementation of local policies; provide technical support for the design, preparation and implementation of socio-educational research; train health mediators; and foster the exchange of experiences among professionals and institutions. Methodologically, the work comprises three phases: an analysis of the problem of HIV/AIDS using an applied research approach, a participatory diagnosis of the actual situation of risk groups in order to make decisions to construct a health prevention discourse adapted to the contextual reality and, finally, the coordinated promotion of educational actions for development. The consolidation of this inter-institutional alliance, which acts on real needs in this context, is producing substantial, tangible changes in the habits and quality of life of the local community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As more HIV-infected people gain access to antiretroviral therapy (ART), monitoring HIV drug resistance (HIVDR) becomes essential to combat both acquired and transmitted HIVDR. Studies have demonstrated dried blood spots (DBS) are a suitable alternative in HIVDR monitoring using DBS collected on Whatman 903 (W-903). In this study, we sought to evaluate two other commercially available filter papers, Ahlstrom 226 (A-226) and Munktell TFN (M-TFN), for HIVDR genotyping following ambient temperature storage. DBS were prepared from remnant blood specimens collected from 334 ART patients and stored at ambient temperature for a median time of 30 days. HIV-1 viral load was determined using NucliSENS EasyQ® HIV-1 v2.0 RUO test kits prior to genotyping of the protease and reverse transcriptase regions of the HIV-1 pol gene using an in-house assay. Among the DBS tested, 26 specimens had a viral load ≥1000 copies/mL in all three types of filter paper and were included in the genotyping analysis. Genotyping efficiencies were similar between DBS collected on W-903 (92.3%), A-226 (88.5%), and M-TFN (92.3%) filter papers (P = 1.00). We identified 50 DR-associated mutations in DBS collected on W-903, 33 in DBS collected on A-226, and 48 in DBS collected on M-TFN, resulting in mutation detection sensitivities of 66.0% for A-226 and 88.0% for M-TFN when compared to W-903. Our data indicate that differences among filter papers may exist at this storage condition and warrant further studies evaluating filter paper type for HIVDR monitoring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: In the context of a randomized controlled trial (RCT) on HIV testing in the emergency department (ED) setting, we evaluated preferences for survey modality and data quality arising from each modality. Methods: Enrolled participants were offered the choice of answering a survey via audio computer assisted self-interview (ACASI) or pen and paper self-administered questionnaire (SAQ). We evaluated factors influencing choice of survey modality. We defined unusable data for a particular survey domain as answering fewer than 75% of the questions in the domain. We then compared ACASI and SAQ with respect to unusable data for domains that address sensitive topics. Results: Of 758 enrolled ED patients, 218 (29%) chose ACASI, 343 chose SAQ (45%) and 197 (26%) opted not to complete either. Results of the log-binomial regression indicated that older (RR = 1.08 per decade) and less educated participants (RR = 1.25) were more likely to choose SAQ over ACASI. ACASI yielded substantially less unusable data than SAQ. Conclusions: In the ED setting there may be a tradeoff between increased participation with SAQ versus better data quality with ACASI. Future studies of novel approaches to maximize the use of ACASI in the ED setting are needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome is a disease with profound effects on the global society, as it affects individual lives, communities, societies, and even nations. As governments try to gear up on the war against this pandemic, an issue of importance pertains to the use of information systems. The systems are used to collect data on the prevalence of the disease, and analyze and transmit the data from the lower levels of the health administration where the testing is done to the higher levels of national policy making where different kinds of interventions are designed. In this article, we argue that the manner in which the representation of the disease is constructed is an important area of concern as it shapes the picture of the disease prevalence and influences how these statistics then get used for the planning of interventions such as supplying drugs and pro-health campaigns. Drawing from the domain of Science and Technology Studies (STS), with a focus on Bruno Latour's (1999) ideas of “circulating reference” we first develop the theoretical notion of representation, and then apply it to an empirical analysis of the reporting systems, both paper- and computer-based, of HIV/AIDS in Mozambique. The successive movements of information about HIV/AIDS prevalence across the various administrative levels are seen as translations that are being constructed through the communication and work practices of the health care workers at different levels, and are shaped by the political interests of the different stakeholders involved, including international agencies and national health authorities. Latour's notion of circulating reference is drawn upon to analyze the question of what is lost, what is gained, and what remains invariant through the successive stages of translation in the construction and use of the representation. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: To end the AIDS epidemic by 2030, despite the increasing poverty and inequalities, policies should be designed to deal with population heterogeneity and environmental changes. Bottom-up designs, such as the Agent-Based Model (ABM), can model these features, dealing with such complexity. HIV/AIDS has a complex dynamic of structural factors, risk behaviors, biomedical characteristics and interventions. All embedded in unequal, stigmatized and heterogeneous social structure. To understand how ABMs can model this complexity, we performed a scoping review of HIV applications, highlighting their potentialities. Methods: We searched on PubMed, Web of Science, and Scopus repositories following the PRISMA extension for scoping reviews. Our inclusion criteria were HIV/AIDS studies with an ABM application. We identified the main articles using a local co-citation analysis and categorized the overall literature aims, (sub)populations, regions, and if the papers declared the use of ODD protocol and limitations. Results: We found 154 articles. We identified eleven main papers, and discussed them using the overall category results. Most studies model Transmission Dynamics (37/154), about Men who have sex with Men (MSM) (41/154), or individuals living in the US or South Africa (84/154). Recent studies applied ABM to model PrEP interventions (17/154) and Racial Disparities (12/154). Only six papers declared the use of ODD Protocol (6/154), and 34/154 didn't mention the study limitations. Conclusions: While ABM is among the most sophisticated techniques available to model HIV/AIDS complexity. Their applications are still restricted to some realities. However, researchers are challenged to think about social structure due model characteristics, the inclusion of these features is still restricted to case-specific. Data and computational power availability can enhance this feature providing insightful results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a list of books related to medical care. Some of them are "Almost Home: Reforming Home and Community Care in Ontario," by Patricia M. Baranek, Raisa B. Deber and A. Paul Williams; "Blackstone's Guide to the Care Standards Act 2000," by Philip Engelman and Paul Spencer; "Health, Illness, and Optimal Aging: Biological and Psychosocial Perspectives," by Carolyn M. Aldwin and Diane F. Gilmer; "My Mother's Hip: Lessons from the World of Eldercare," by Luisa Margolies; and "Addressing HIV/AIDS in East Asia and the Pacific," by Michael Borowitz, Elizabeth Wiley, Fadia Saadah and Enis Baris.

Historically, humanity has suffered and endured deadly pandemics of varying mortality rates. Irrefutably, research shows that the outbreak of pandemics is flooded by mythical and fallacious information among the public, hence stifling the prevention, treatment, and management of diseases. This paper focused on comparing selected aspects of the two pandemics, that is, HIV/AIDS and Coronavirus. This comparative analysis is important for drawing informative lessons for effective response and management of pandemics in the future. Through a literature review analysis, the paper established that both pandemics have more similarities than distinctions. The etiology and epidemiology of the diseases assume a similar cascading trajectory; the public health information about the diseases is characterized by myths, conspiracy theories, illusions, and delusions from the public. The myths associated with pandemics prevail around causation, disease transmission, and cure. The pandemics present economic paradoxes, though arguably the negatives outdo the positives. There is a need for the governments and international health custodians to be richly prepared for the pandemics in the future. This implies having special budgetary allocations for possible pandemic outbreaks, investing in vaccine development and disease surveillance, and training and skilling personnel in all social-health-related sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Several bibliometric studies have been published on AIDS. The findings obtained from these studies have provided a general picture of the history and growth of AIDS literature. However, factors related to variation in HIV research productivity in sub-Saharan Africa have not been examined. Therefore, this study aims to fill some of the gap in existing research to provide insights into factors associated with HIV research productivity in sub-Saharan Africa. Methods: A bibliometric analysis regarding sub-Saharan Africa HIV/AIDS research was conducted in the PubMed database for the period of 1981 to 2009. The numbers of HIV research articles indexed in PubMed was used as surrogate for total HIV research productivity. Series of univariable and multivariable negative binomial regression models were used to explore factors associated with variation in HIV research productivity in sub-Saharan Africa. Results: First authors from South Africa, Uganda and Kenya contributed almost half of the total number of HIV articles indexed in PubMed between 1981 and 2009. Uganda, Zimbabwe and Malawi had better records when the total production was adjusted for gross domestic product (GDP). Comoros, the Gambia and Guinea-Bissau were the most productive countries when the total products were normalized by number of people with HIV. There were strong positive and statistically significant correlation between countries number of indexed journal (Pearson correlation r = 0.77, p = .001), number of higher institutions (r = 0.60, p = .001), number of physicians (r = 0.83, p = .001) and absolute numbers of HIV articles. Conclusions: HIV research productivity in Africa is highly skewed. To increase HIV research output, total expenditure on health (% of GDP), private expenditure on health, and adult literacy rate may be important factors to address. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on HIV/AIDS epidemic in Malaysia. The first case of HIV was detected in Malaysia in 1986. Since that first case, yearly reports of confirmed cases of HIV and AIDS have been increasing. Part of the increase was due the introduction of new programs such as testing of antenatal mothers and voluntary testing in the southern state of Johor in 2001, as well as compulsory testing of Muslim couples before marriage in one of the states. Malaysia has been battling drug use for almost 50 years, even prior to the discovery of HIV/AIDS.

Many studies have documented nurses’ attitudes and concerns regarding AIDS/HIV, but little is known about Taiwanese nurses. We documented attitudes, concerns, gloving practices and practical AIDS/HIV knowledge of 1090 nurses from one metropolitan hospital in Changhua City, Taiwan. The response rate was 80.9%. Both HIV and hepatitis contraction in the workplace was nurses’ main concern. Two hundred and ten nurses (19.3%) were seriously considering leaving nursing because of fear of contracting AIDS/HIV. Virtually all nurses considered it their right to be informed of the presence of HIV-positive patients in their direct work area and many believed that HIV testing of patients should be mandatory. Practical AIDS/HIV knowledge was deficient. These Taiwanese nurses have concerns and fears that might be related to deficiencies in practical AIDS/HIV knowledge. Continuous educational programmes are recommended to alleviate these nurses’ attitudes and concerns regarding AIDS/HIV. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In sub-Saharan Africa, HIV/AIDS has proven to be the most challenging health and development issue of modern times. Its spread is related to poverty, power relationships between men and women, the availability and accessibility of basic services, sexual customs, and the evolution of traditional practices in modern society. Currently, most HIV/AIDS communication strategies are based on health education or behavior change models such as those designed to improve immunization coverage or eradicate polio. In UNICEF's human rights approach to programming, communication is explicitly recognized as both a right and a means to claiming other rights. UNICEF is developing the concept and practice of communication from a human rights perspective as it responds to the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Eastern and Southern Africa. As it does so, it is refining its experience from other program areas, so that currently it is using a range of communication techniques. Hence, communication from a human rights perspective examines the context in which change occurs, broadening the responsibility for creating change from the individual to the community.

Presents a commentary on the studies which examined cases of psychoanalytic psychotherapy with people with HIV and AIDS by Ubaldo Leli and Robert Weinstein. Literature which confronted questions of working with people living with HIV/AIDS; Influence of the analyst's theoretical point of view on how matters concerning HIV/AIDS are handled.

In high-resolution remote sensing images, there are areas with weak textures such as large building roofs, which occupy a large number of pixels in the image. These areas pose a challenge for traditional semantic segmentation networks to obtain ideal results. Common strategies like downsampling, patch cropping, and cascade models often sacrifice fine details or global context, resulting in limited accuracy. To address these issues, a novel semantic segmentation framework has been designed specifically for large-format high-resolution remote sensing images by aggregating global and local features in this paper. The framework consists of two branches: one branch deals with low-resolution downsampled images to capture global features, while the other branch focuses on cropped patches to extract high-resolution local details. Also, this paper introduces a feature aggregation module based on the Transformer structure, which effectively aggregates global and local information. Additionally, to save GPU memory usage, a novel three-step training method has been developed. Extensive experiments on two public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, with an IoU of 90.83% on the AIDS dataset and 90.30% on the WBDS dataset, surpassing state-of-the-art methods such as DANet, DeepLab v3+, U-Net, ViT, TransUNet, CMTFNet, and UANet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Implementation science (IS) offers methods to systematically achieve the Ending the HIV Epidemic goals in the United States, as well as the global UNAIDS targets. Federal funders such as the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH) have invested in implementation research to achieve these goals, including supporting the AIDS Research Centres (ARCs), which focus on high‐impact science in HIV and mental health (MH). To facilitate capacity building for the HIV/MH research workforce in IS, "grey areas," or areas of IS that are confusing, particularly for new investigators, should be addressed in the context of HIV/MH research. Discussion: A group of IS experts affiliated with NIMH‐funded ARCs convened to identify common and challenging grey areas. The group generated a preliminary list of 19 grey areas in HIV/MH‐related IS. From the list, the authors developed a survey which was distributed to all ARCs to prioritize grey areas to address in this paper. ARC members across the United States (N = 60) identified priority grey areas requiring clarification. This commentary discusses topics with 40% or more endorsement. The top grey areas that ARC members identified were: (1) Differentiating implementation strategies from interventions; (2) Determining when an intervention has sufficient evidence for adaptation; (3) Integrating recipient perspectives into HIV/MH implementation research; (4) Evaluating whether an implementation strategy is evidence‐based; (5) Identifying rigorous approaches for evaluating the impact of implementation strategies in the absence of a control group or randomization; and (6) Addressing innovation in HIV/MH IS grants. The commentary addresses each grey area by drawing from the existing literature (when available), providing expert guidance on addressing each in the context of HIV/MH research, and providing domestic and global HIV and HIV/MH case examples that address these grey areas. Conclusions: HIV/MH IS is key to achieving domestic and international goals for ending HIV transmission and mitigating its impact. Guidance offered in this paper can help to overcome challenges to rigorous and high‐impact HIV/MH implementation research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In recent years, telemedicine has advanced significantly, offering new possibilities for improving healthcare and patient outcomes. This paper presents a telemedicine app for HIV patients, developed using a human-centered design approach. Designed to meet the diverse and specific needs of Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) users and Late Presenters (LP), the app is part of the COMTRAC-HIV Project at the University Hospital Frankfurt. Through interviews with HIV experts and healthcare professionals, initial design solutions were derived. The paper explores the app's design process, core functionalities, and future directions, aiming to provide comprehensive support for individuals living with HIV. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines which papers/concepts in the area of surgical pathology from 1957 to 2007 are considered as the most significant. The author considers acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) as the best example of a pathological entity that had been described in a fair manner, based on his observation and that of his colleagues. He says that the most essential papers are those that altered the field of surgical pathology.

Here we discuss the impact of Beral et al's 1990 paper "Kaposi's sarcoma among persons with AIDS: a sexually transmitted infection?" Not only did this paper galvanise research into the underlying infectious cause of Kaposi's sarcoma, it also demonstrated the power of observational epidemiology in pointing the way towards major discoveries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a list of books related to health care received by the journal. They include "Our Parents, Ourselves: How American Health Care Imperils Middle Age and Beyond," by Judith Steinberg Turiel, "The African State and the AIDS Crisis," by Amy S. Patterson, and "Nurses on the Move: Migration and the Global Health Care Economy," by Mireille Kingma.

Tobacco smoking undermines the effectiveness of antiretroviral therapy (ART) among people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) and potentially associates with other health problems. This study aimed to analyze the growth and content of research on smoking among PLWHA on Web of Science Database. Co-occurrence analysis and Jaccard's' similarity index calculation were performed to identify and visualize networks of countries collaboration, keywords co-occurrence, and research topics. Exploratory factor analysis was applied to the abstracts' contents to uncover research domains and landscapes. The number of publications increased by 14.55% annually in the period of 1991-2017, with 74% of total papers published within 2007-2017. A wide range of topics have been covered, notably co-morbidities, interventions on smoking abstinence and cessation, and the enforcing relationship of smoking cessation with antiretroviral treatment adherence. A shortage of studies on smoking among PLWHA in low-and middle-income countries, limited collaborations between countries outside of close geographical proximity and a lack of discussion on local contexts and psychosocial factors were found. Smoking among PLWHA has been being studied more extensively in recent years, enhancing our knowledge and awareness of the significant and specific effects smoking have on PLWHA, which, in turn, assisting the proposals and implementations of suitable solutions. However, more efforts should be made to examine and understand contextualized aspects, including culture and beliefs specific to each nation or smaller sub-population within a country, especially those currently under-researched, as well as psycho-behavioral factors to implement more effective interventions to reduce smoking among PLWHA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mitigating the impacts of Human Immunodeficiency Virus/Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (HIV/AIDS) and substance use requires comprehensive and systematic thinking in designing interventions and developing policies. This study describes the growth of research publications from 1991 to 2021 in the Web of Science database and points out current research landscapes in the fields of HIV/AIDS and substance use. Latent Dirichlet Allocation was used for classifying 21 359 papers into corresponding topics. The most common topics were HIV transmission, HIV infection, quality of life and mental health of substance users, and the biomedical effect of substance use. Emerging research landscapes include vulnerabilities of people who inject drugs to HIV transmission and related health problems. This study found a lack of research on health services, interdisciplinary and inter-sectoral in combination with clinical evaluation and treatment services. Future investment and implementation of HIV/AIDS and substance use programs should focus on research of health services and clinical evaluation, especially context-specific interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The field of mobility assistance devices has evolved significantly in recent years, with technology playing a pivotal role in enhancing the lives of individuals with mobility challenges. This paper explores the future of walking aids, focusing on Septor, a smart walking stick that is an innovative assistive device designed to enhance the mobility and safety of individuals with mobility impairments. This advanced walking aid incorporates cutting-edge technologies and features to provide a holistic solution for users, improving their overall quality of life. The Septor operates based on echolocation technology. One of the key features of Septor is its smartphone connectivity. The walking stick can be synchronized with a dedicated mobile application, enabling users to monitor their walking patterns, receive personalized exercise recommendations, and track their progress over time. The app also facilitates communication with healthcare professionals for remote consultations and adjustments. A lot of research is being done to find ways to enhance the lives of visually challenged individuals. Multiple walking sticks and systems aid users in moving around indoor and outdoor locations, but none of them offer object detection and identification alerts. The Septor employs ultrasonic sensors to echo sound waves and detect objects. This paper discusses Septor, a groundbreaking smart walking stick that revolutionizes the mobility aid industry by promoting user safety, independence, and convenience. This innovative device aims to improve the lives of individuals with mobility challenges and provide a valuable tool for healthcare professionals in the rehabilitation process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]