What is already known on this topic?There has been a steady increase of new reported HIV infections in individuals aged 15–24 years,primarily from self-reported men who have sex with men(MSM).What is added by this report?MSM aged 15–19 years practiced behaviors that put them at high risk for HIV and other sexually transmitted infections(STIs).Systems to address their unique risks and vulnerabilities in both school settings and in high impact HIV interventions may be inadequate.What are the implications for public health practice?Special needs of MSM aged 15–19 years must be met by starting sex education in junior high school and sensitizing health workers in and out of school settings on quality counselling,testing,and referral.Piloting approaches that address age of consent issues are also suggested.
In this paper,we study general recovery functions and treatment in the dynamics of an SIS model for sexually transmitted infections with nonzero partnership length.It is shown how partnership dynamics influences the predicted prevalence at the steady state and the basic reproduction number.Sobol's indices are used to evaluate the contribution of model parameters to the overall variance of R 0.The recovery functions studied here take into account that society's capacity to provide treatment is limited when the number of infected individuals is large.Bifurcation analysis is used to establish a relationship between an alert level of prevalence and the minimum recovery time that guarantees the eradication of the disease.We also show that a backward bifurcation can occur when there are delays in the treatment of infected individuals.
The purpose of this cross-sectional descriptive study was to assess knowledge level regarding signs and symptoms, prevention, treatment of STIs among a sample of residents from Southeastern Texas. One hundred and fifty-seven participants age 18 and over responded to the 23 questionnaire items. Questionnaires were distributed to mostly public places such as hair salons, fitness centers, health centers, gas stations, apartments, and stores. Results indicated that 50.3% of participants reported syphilis was not curable;while over 61% reported gonorrhea was incurable. Over 64% of respondents reported they did know the symptoms for syphilis and over 70% believed that syphilis was vaccine preventable. The data collected from this study indicated that some residents from Southeast Texas lack basic information concerning Syphilis, Gonorrhea, and Chlamydia with regard to prevention, signs and symptoms, and treatment. The cost and effort to increase educational programs and educational messages appear to be justified. Implications for practice include increasing funding and efforts to provide more educational programs focusing on sexually transmitted disease prevention, health literary education to dispel the myths and stigma related to STIs and community wide collaboration efforts to increase awareness.
Israel G. MsengiClementine MsengiScholastique NikuzeJoel Barton
Background: The global incidence of STIs is rising. It is estimated that 499 million new cases of curable STIs occur every year. The existence of more than one million reported cases of STIs annually in Iran shows that addressing this issue must be a priority for Iranian health authorities. While recognition of the importance of gender issues to reproductive health (RH) programs has grown significantly in the past several years, major challenges remain in implementing gender-sensitive programs. Gender mainstreaming in Iranian reproductive health program is a relatively new issue, so this study aims to explore gender sensitive STIs/HIV/AIDS prevention policies. Method: This study employed a qualitative research design. Participants were health managers, health policy makers and reproductive health providers. They were selected purposefully and then continued by snowball sampling method. 43 semi-structured in-depth interviews with 37 key informants were done. All the interviews were recorded and transcribed. The data were analyzed by content analysis method. Trustworthiness of the data was achieved by using credibility, trans-ferability and conformability. Results: Key informants clearly explained the gender sensitive STIs/ HIV/AIDS prevention policies in three main categories: 1) advocacy, 2) collaboration between different sectors and 3) community empowerment to gender sensitive STIs/HIV/AIDS prevention programs. Conclusion: Changing gender neural STIs/HIV/AIDS prevention policy to more complete gender sensitive policy needs advocacy, collaboration of sectors and community empowerment.
