Epidemiology in the News, Coursework Example

I chose the following article in the Los Angeles Times (“Pills found to be highly effective in preventing HIV transmission”) regarding recent clinical studies in the use of pre-exposure prophylaxis for HIV/AIDS patients in Africa.    The newspaper reports on two recent studies in Africa where taking a daily pill of two anti-HIV drugs reduced transmission by almost as much as three-quarters in heterosexual couples.  The results were based on two different clinical trials: 1) A trial involving 4,758 couples in Kenya and Uganda; there were three different groups (1-tenofovir group; 2) tenofovir and embritcitabine; 3) placebo 😉 2) A trial involving 1,200 healthy, sexually active males and females in Botswana with two different groups (  1) Trubada; 2) Placebo).

The article’s main appropriation of epidemiology is in the headline statistic: individuals in the treatment group experienced up to a 75% reduction in the incidence of HIV/AIDS in individuals who took one to two anti-HIV pills daily.  This statistic reflects incidence (or new cases) of HIV/ AIDS of one prevention group in the studies compared to the placebo group.  Usually, news articles usually mention relative measures of association or absolute measures of association, but rarely mention both.  In the case of this article, the author does a thorough job in not only mentioning the relative change (in percentage) experienced by treatment and placebo groups, but also providing absolute reduction (measured by people who didn’t contract HIV/AIDS) by group.  A minor suggestion, but one of great importance, is that greater context of the study (and other studies) of prophylaxis in treating HIV/AIDS in general would have allowed the reader to understand this study as part of a larger trend in the treatment of difficult infectious diseases (CDC, 2010).

References

Maugh, T. (2011, July, 13).  Pills found to be highly effective in preventing HIV transmission.  Los Angeles Times.

CDC (2010).  CDC’s clinical studies of pre-exposure prophylaxis for HIV prevention.  Available at:  http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/prep.