Background: Insecticide Treated Nets (ITNs) are an important tool for malaria control. ITNs are effective because they work on several parts of the mosquito feeding cycle, including both adult killing and repelling effects.

Objective We investigated the hypothesis that partner-specific characteristics are important to improve an individual's risk characterization. Design It has been shown that the egocentric network structure is important to establish a person's risk for infection. Methods The study was cross-sectional in its design and enrolled 1231 volunteers at one HIV testing site in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and applied an adapted ego-network questionnaire. Each individual was interviewed about their own risk factors and those related to up to 10 sex partners. We used the dyadic data analysis method in which each relationship forms a record. Two receiver operator characteristic curves were generated, and the ability to correctly predict volunteers' HIV serostatus based on a model with characteristics of volunteers and sex partners and another with only volunteers' characteristics was evaluated. Results Partner-related variables were associated with HIV serostatus both for men and women. The model with volunteer/sex partners' characteristics performed better in discriminating between HIV-positive and negative volunteers only for men but not for women. The c statistic for men volunteers was 0.82 [95% confidence interval (CI) 0.77–0.87] for the volunteer alone model and 0.88 (95% CI 0.86–0.91) for the combined model (P = 0.03). The values for women were 0.75 (95% CI 0.65–0.86) and 0.78 (95% CI 0.71–0.85), respectively (P = 0.71). Conclusion Ego-network theory-based approaches provide additional information for characterizing risk for HIV infection among men.

The cue technique can improve sexual partners' recall in cultural contexts different than the United States, mainly for individuals already reporting several partners before the cue.

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