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New HIV/AIDS Prevention Methods for Women Needed
PHI's Bethany Young Hold and WHO's Manjula Lusti-Narasimhan make the case for MPTs in an opinion piece published in the San Francisco Chronicle. They address the need for better prevention, call for funding into MPT research, and ask for greater collaboration between HIV and contraception research.
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President Obama’s significant commitment of $100 million in funding for HIV/AIDS treatment research will surely bring us closer to a cure. But hand in hand with even the best treatment should be better prevention.
High HIV infection rates among women around the world point to an urgent demand for new prevention methods that specifically address women’s health needs. Every minute, a young woman is infected with HIV. Married women, or those in committed relationships, are at particular risk of infection because only 8 percent of couples around the world use condoms.
It is time to turn our collective will toward finding methods that protect women from HIV and other sexually transmitted infections at the same time as preventing unplanned pregnancy. Multipurpose prevention technologies are a new class of products in development that do just that. What stands in the way of advancing the field may be how women’s health issues are funded.
Bethany Young Holt is the executive director of the Coalition Advancing Multipurpose Innovations, a project of the Public Health Institute; Manjula Lusti-Narasimhan is a scientist with the World Health Organization. Both writers are with the Initiative for Multipurpose Prevention Technologies.
Originally published by San Francisco Chronicle
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