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Comprehensive & Cost Effective Laboratory Monitoring of HIV/AIDS: an African Role Model
23:56

Comprehensive & Cost Effective Laboratory Monitoring of HIV/AIDS: an African Role Model

Published on: October 31, 2010

HIV, logic and sex in Africa

Lucy Allais1, W D Francois Venter

  • 1The Philosophy Department, The University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2000, South Africa. Lucy.Allais@wits.ac.za

Preventive Medicine
|August 14, 2012
PubMed

Insights

The widely accepted

Area of Science:

  • Epidemiology
  • Public Health
  • Behavioral Science

Background:

  • High rates of HIV infection in sub-Saharan Africa have been attributed to multiple concurrent partnerships.
  • Concurrency, or the simultaneous engagement in multiple sexual relationships, is a proposed driver of HIV transmission.
  • This explanation has been widely accepted in the region.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To critically evaluate the 'concurrency hypothesis' as an explanation for high HIV infection rates in sub-Saharan Africa.
  • To examine the conceptual and empirical limitations of the concurrency explanation.
  • To determine if 'concurrency' offers distinct insights into HIV epidemiology in the region.

Main Methods:

  • Conceptual analysis of the 'concurrency hypothesis'.
  • Review of existing literature on sexual partnering and HIV transmission in sub-Saharan Africa.
  • Examination of the definition and application of the term 'concurrency'.

Main Results:

  • The study identifies two significant problems with the concurrency explanation.
  • The term 'concurrency' is imprecise and lacks a clear, singular definition.
  • There is no single, well-defined 'concurrency hypothesis' that adequately explains HIV rates.

Conclusions:

  • The concurrency explanation does not contribute to understanding the unusually high rates of HIV infection in sub-Saharan Africa.
  • The concept of 'concurrency' is too vague to identify an explanatorily distinct form of sexual behavior.
  • Alternative explanations are needed to understand HIV epidemiology in the region.

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