HIV spread driven by number of partners, rather than concurrency
The spread of HIV is driven more by how many sexual partners a person has in their lifetime rather than having more than one lover at a time.
This is according to extensive research conducted over five years by scientists from the Africa Centre in Umkhanyakude district in rural KwaZulu-Natal. The results were published today (Friday 15 July) in the prestigious Lancet journal.
Debate has raged for years about the role that concurrent sexual partnerships (ie sexual partnerships that overlap in time) play in HIV transmission, with a number of experts arguing that concurrent partnerships are a key driver of the epidemic in Africa.
But according to Dr Frank Tanser, the study’s principal investigator: ‘Our results clearly demonstrate the impact of multiple partnering on the transmission of HIV but we find no evidence to suggest that sexual partnerships that overlap (concurrent) are playing a disproportionately large role in driving the high rate of new infections.’
Tanser and his team followed more than 7000 women who were all HIV negative to begin with. Almost 10 percent (693 women) became infected with HIV during the study.
The researchers used questionnaires on sexual behaviour from almost 3000 men to inform their study.
Using innovative geographical mapping, the researchers plotted communities where men reported a high level of concurrent partners as well as these where men reported higher numbers of lifetime sexual partners.
‘The high rates of HIV infection were no different between communities with the highest levels of male concurrency and communities with low levels of concurrent partnerships,’ said Tanser.
In contrast, women living in areas where local men reported an increase in the average number of reported life-time partners had a significantly higher risk of becoming infected with HIV infection.
However, the scientists noted that concurrent partners may have played an important role in the rapid spread of HIV during the early phase of the HIV epidemic.
According to the Africa Centre, which is part of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, the results show that HIV prevention messages need to be clear and directed at reducing the number of sexual partners ‘irrespective of whether these partnerships overlap’. – Health-e News Service.
Author
Kerry Cullinan is the Managing Editor at Health-e News Service. Follow her on Twitter @kerrycullinan11
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Unless otherwise noted, you can republish our articles for free under a Creative Commons license. Here’s what you need to know:
You have to credit Health-e News. In the byline, we prefer “Author Name, Publication.” At the top of the text of your story, include a line that reads: “This story was originally published by Health-e News.” You must link the word “Health-e News” to the original URL of the story.
You must include all of the links from our story, including our newsletter sign up link.
If you use canonical metadata, please use the Health-e News URL. For more information about canonical metadata, click here.
You can’t edit our material, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style. (For example, “yesterday” can be changed to “last week”)
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. Health-e News understands that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarise or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
You can’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
If you share republished stories on social media, we’d appreciate being tagged in your posts. You can find us on Twitter @HealthENews, Instagram @healthenews, and Facebook Health-e News Service.
You can grab HTML code for our stories easily. Click on the Creative Commons logo on our stories. You’ll find it with the other share buttons.
If you have any other questions, contact info@health-e.org.za.
HIV spread driven by number of partners, rather than concurrency
by Kerry Cullinan, Health-e News
July 14, 2011