author's abstract.) Investigators from the University of Pennsylvania, the Catholic University of Chile, and the Ministry of Health of Chile propose a collaborative program of research aimed at preventing the spread of AIDS in Chile. The number of known persons in Chile infected with HIV has grown rapidly in recent years; the disease is transmitted primarily through sexual contact and heterosexual transmission is increasing. (More than 1,000 cases have been identified to date; intravenous drug use accounts for only 2% of known cases.) Chile's network of primary and secondary health care clinics provides an existing infrastructure on which to build an AIDS prevention program that has the potential to reach a large cross section of the population and which, if successful, could be sustained over time without the investment of substantial additional resources. The purpose of this project is threefold: First, a screening instrument will be developed for assessing HIV risk that is feasible to implement by nurses in primary health care clinics; acceptable and, therefore, applicable to most clinic patients; and reliable and valid as a predictor of risk in order to target interventions to those most likely to benefit. Second, interventions will be designed on the basis of risk profile of clinic patients and evaluated in a randomized experiment to determine effectiveness in reducing high-risk behaviors. Third, the AIDS research capacity within Chile will be enhanced; particularly, nursing research that could be critical to sustaining AIDS prevention programs over the long term will be strengthened.
| Aiken, L H; Smith, H L; Lake, E T (1997) Using existing health care systems to respond to the AIDS epidemic: research and recommendations for Chile. Int J Health Serv 27:177-99 |
| Smith, H L (1993) On the limited utility of KAP-style survey data in the practical epidemiology of AIDS, with reference to the AIDS epidemic in Chile. Health Transit Rev 3:1-16 |
