The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that two-thirds of all STIs worldwide occur in young people--teenagers and those in their early twenties (WHO 1993, WHO 1995). The provision of STI services to these age groups should therefore be high on the agenda of STI programme planners and adolescent/young people's health programmers alike. However, attempts to promote the sexual health of young people have so far tended to focus on prevention, education and counselling, while the provision of services to those who have already faced the consequences of unprotected sexual activity, including pregnancy and STI, or sexual violence, has lagged behind. In 1999-2000 a review was commissioned by GTZ of the characteristics of adolescent sexuality, evidence of STI risk in adolescents, the profile of adolescents in need of STI care, types and evidence of success of different STI service delivery models for adolescents and the advantages and disadvantages of each of these, and to what extent a youth-specific approach to STI services or an STI-specific approach to adolescent health service delivery, is warranted. This review will be published jointly by GTZ and WHO with the title Sexually Transmitted Infections among Adolescents: The Need for Adequate Health Services. This is a shortened form of the Summary and Conclusions of this book.

SUMMARY The women, men, and transgender persons who sell sex globally have disproportionate risks and burdens of HIV, in low, middle and high income country settings, and in concentrated and generalized epidemic contexts. The greatest HIV burdens continue to be among African women sex workers. Worldwide, sex workers continue to face reduced access to needed HIV prevention, treatment, and care services. Legal environments, policies and policing practices, lack of funding for research and HIV programming, human rights violations and stigma and discrimination continue to challenge sex workers’ abilities to protect themselves, their families, and their sexual partners from HIV. These realities must change for the benefits of recent advances in HIV prevention and treatment to be realized and for global control of the HIV pandemic to be achieved. Effective combination prevention and treatment approaches are feasible, can be tailored for cultural competence, can be cost-saving and can help address the unmet needs of sex workers and their communities in ways that uphold their human rights. To address HIV among sex workers will require sustained community engagement and empowerment, continued research, political will, structural and policy reform and innovative programming. But it can and must be done.

Background Recent data from antenatal clinic (ANC) surveillance and general population surveys suggest substantial declines in human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) prevalence in Zimbabwe. We assessed the contributions of rising mortality, falling HIV incidence and sexual behaviour change to the decline in HIV prevalence.Methods Comprehensive review and secondary analysis of national and local sources on trends in HIV prevalence, HIV incidence, mortality and sexual behaviour covering the period 1985–2007.Results HIV prevalence fell in Zimbabwe over the past decade (national estimates: from 29.3% in 1997 to 15.6% in 2007). National census and survey estimates, vital registration data from Harare and Bulawayo, and prospective local population survey data from eastern Zimbabwe showed substantial rises in mortality during the 1990s levelling off after 2000. Direct estimates of HIV incidence in male factory workers and women attending pre- and post-natal clinics, trends in HIV prevalence in 15–24-year-olds, and back-calculation estimates based on the vital registration data from Harare indicated that HIV incidence may have peaked in the early 1990s and fallen during the 1990s. Household survey data showed reductions in numbers reporting casual partners from the late 1990s and high condom use in non-regular partnerships between 1998 and 2007.Conclusions These findings provide the first convincing evidence of an HIV decline accelerated by changes in sexual behaviour in a southern African country. However, in 2007, one in every seven adults in Zimbabwe was still infected with a life-threatening virus and mortality rates remained at crisis level.

Objectives To review the literature on the potential efficiency gains of integrating HIV services with other health services. Design Systematic literature review. Search of electronic databases, manual searching and snowball sampling. Studies that presented results on cost, efficiency or cost-effectiveness of integrated HIV services were included, focusing on low-and middleincome countries. Evidence was analysed and synthesised through a narrative approach and the quality of studies assessed. Results Of 666 citations retrieved, 46 were included (35 peer reviewed and 11 from grey literature).

Our data confirm that HIV must have been rapidly spreading among IDU in several countries of the former Soviet Union, whereas central and southeast Europe have so far escaped a more extensive spread of HIV. Factors that might have fuelled a massive spread among IDU include changes in drug demand and supply, migration and specific local drug production and consumption patterns. High rates of syphilis reported in the countries of the former Soviet Union highlight that subregion's increased vulnerability with regards to a further spread of the epidemic, via heterosexual intercourse, into the general population.

No abstract

No abstract

Although effective programmes are available and several countries have seen substantial declines in new HIV infections, progress in the reduction of adult HIV incidence has been slower than expected worldwide and many countries have not had large decreases in new infections in adults despite large reductions in paediatric infections. Reasons for slow progress include inadequate commitment, investment, focus, scale, and quality of implementation of prevention and treatment interventions. The UNAIDS-Lancet Commission on Defeating AIDS-Advancing Global Health reported that the provision of large-scale, effective HIV prevention programmes has failed and called on stakeholders to "get serious about HIV prevention". An ambitious worldwide target has been set by UNAIDS to reduce new infections below 500 000 by 2020-a 75% reduction from 2010. Models show that such a reduction requires a combination of primary prevention interventions and preventative effects of treatment. Achievement of the target will require more effective delivery of HIV prevention for sufficient coverage in populations at greatest risk of infection ensuring that interventions that have proved effective are made available, barriers to their uptake are overcome, demand is created, and use is consistent and occurs at the right scale with high coverage. This paper discusses how programmatic targets for prevention in a worldwide plan could be used to re-energise the HIV prevention approach. A management framework is proposed outlining global, regional, national, and subnational actions and is summarised in a call for action on HIV prevention for 2020.