Clearly much water (23 weeks worth, apparently) has passed under the bridge since I last posted on new papers crossing my rss/email desk. So here are the latest batch:
- I am more than a little fascinated by the interplay of race, SES, gender and any other stratifier you can mention in determining infection risks. And in the field of STIs, I appear not to be the only one. One angle on this is to look at multiple low-power identities and see how they interact. For example, here‘s a paper that focuses on the intersection of race/ethnicity and sexual orientation. Risks definitely rise with multiple minority statuses, but the pattern is non-simple and varies by sex. It’s never as simple as you’d think.
- More on concurrent partnerships in Africa. A recent study found no association between (self-reported) concurrent partnerships and HIV incidence in rural South Africa and while it is generally accepted that concurrency can theoretically drive an HIV epidemic, empirical evidence remains scant that it does so. One reason for this may be that while concurrency is risky, its prevalence is low. This idea is supported by a paper out of Malawi from last year which finds that concurrency is long-lasting when it occurs, but that it occurs infrequently (only in 9% of the sample). Lots more evidence is needed on this, but these are the right questions to be asking.
- This one is only “new to me”. Dynamic models of sexual relationships (and other contact networks, I think that sexual networks are simpler than most) need to be a big new field in ID Epi. If that’s going to happen we (public health people) are going to need to read lots of network analysis stuff (aside: here‘s an intro from Nick Christakis and collaborator Kirsten P Smith (meta-aside: Smith’s disseration from Penn looks really interesting – international comparisons of STI rates, but I can’t see it published yet). If you want more theoretical details, James Moody – one of the key people behind the Add Health network work mentioned in the above article – wrote a paper in Social Forces a decade ago, which outlines things nicely. Beach reading, if I ever made it to the beach. And enjoyed reading once there.
Next time I’ll try and make these papers a little more up-to-date, but this’ll have to do for now.
Constrained Optimization 