This article reviews 22 studies that test a variety of interventions to decrease AIDS stigma in developed and developing countries. This article assesses published studies that met stringent evaluation criteria in order to draw lessons for future development of interventions to combat stigma. The target group, setting, type of intervention, measures, and scale of these studies varied tremendously. The majority (14) of the studies aimed to increase tolerance of persons living with HIV/AIDS (PLHA) among the general population. The remaining studies tested interventions to increase willingness to treat PLHA among health care providers or improve coping strategies for dealing with AIDS stigma among PLHA or at-risk groups. Results suggest some stigma reduction interventions appear to work, at least on a small scale and in the short term, but many gaps remain especially in relation to scale and duration of impact and in terms of gendered impact of stigma reduction interventions.
Emergency department free-text chief complaints (CCs) are a major data source for syndromic surveillance. CCs need to be classified into syndromic categories for subsequent automatic analysis. However, the lack of a standard vocabulary and high-quality encodings of CCs hinder effective classification. This paper presents a new ontology-enhanced automatic CC classification approach. Exploiting semantic relations in a medical ontology, this approach is motivated to address the CC vocabulary variation problem in general and to meet the specific need for a classification approach capable of handling multiple sets of syndromic categories. We report an experimental study comparing our approach with two popular CC classification methods using a real-world dataset. This study indicates that our ontology-enhanced approach performs significantly better than the benchmark methods in terms of sensitivity, F measure, and F2 measure.
High risks of HIV infection have led to dramatic changes in patterns of early sexual experience among young Thai men. We know little about the shifts in attitudes and expectations underlying these changes in behavior. METHODS: In-depth interviews with 10 young men are used to explore recent changes in the social context of male heterosexual relations in Thailand. Changes in ideas about the appropriateness and availability of commercial and noncommercial sexual relationships are examined, as well as changes in ideas regarding the importance of condom use during various types of sexual encounters. The use of standard interview guidelines and the systematic coding and analysis of transcripts allows comparison of these issues across cases. RESULTS: In large part because of fears about AIDS, at least some younger Thai men are rebuffing older friends' efforts to initiate them into traditional patterns of sexual life, patterns that emphasize heavy alcohol consumption followed by a group visit to a brothel. Some participants report that opportunities exist for sexual relationships with female peers; these opportunities appear to be leading men and women to reevaluate longstanding patterns of male sexual expression. CONCLUSIONS: The changing context of men's early sexual behavior should be considered when developing programs to prevent commercial sex patronage and to reduce the spread of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases through noncommercial or quasicommercial sexual relationships.
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