This Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of the theories, methods and approaches for reducing HIV-associated risk behaviors. It represents the first single source of information about HIV prevention research in developed and developing countries. It will be an important resource for students, researchers and clinicians in the field.

"I'm like a whirling leaf in the wind," said one of Dr. Lena Nilsson SchOnnesson' s patients, and another "I'm in the claws of HIV." Their voices and those of other HIV-positive patients frame the humanistic and scholarly discussion in this impor- tant book. Dr. SchOnnesson, a Fulbright scholar at the HIV Center for Clinical and Behavioral Studies, Columbia University in 1995, has unusually extensive clinical experience in counseling HIV-positive gay men. Her work with 38 such patients treated between 1986 and 1995 is discussed in the pages that follow. Dr. SchOnnesson's longitudinal approach...

Globally, action to prevent HIV spread is inadequate. Over 16,000 new infections occur every day. Yet we are not helpless in the face of disaster, as shown by the rich prevention experience analyzed in this valuable new compendium. "Best pr- tice" exists-a set of tried and tested ways of slowing the spread of HIV, of persuading and enabling people to protect themselves and others from the virus. Individually, features of best practice can be found almost everywhere. The tragedy, on a world scale, is that prevention is spotty, not comprehensive; the measures are not being applied on anywhere...

"AIDS is kind of like life, just speeded up. " JavonP., heroinaddictwithAIDS, Bronx, NewYork, 1988 "Now I'm not so much scared of dying as scared of living. " Mike D., heroin addict with AIDS, New Haven, Connecticut, 1998 Within little more than a decade, AIDS has been tranformed from an untreatable, rapidly fatal illness, into a manageable, chronic disease. Most of this tranformation has occurred in the past five years, accelerated by the advent of protease inhibitors and the proven benefits of combination antiretroviral therapy and prophylaxis against opportunistic infections. For people...

Methodological problems have hampered researchers' efforts to understand and control AIDS since the beginning of the epidemic. This practical book addresses these problems by using actual health research case studies to develop strategies regarding design and sampling, measurement, and analysis and modeling issues. Researchers working on both biological and behavioral aspects of the disease will find this work a singularly effective tool to improve their study designs.

Public health has a legacy of neglect regarding social and behavioral research. Too often, prompted by technical and scientific progress, we have ignored- even marginalized-the vital "human element" in health thinking and prac- tice. Thus, for example, while family planning programs focused on providing a choice among safe and effective contraceptive methods (a supremely worthy goal), the central issue of sexuality and sexual behavior was generally neglected. Similarly, the enormous and important efforts to develop rapid and reliable diagnostic and treatment methods for sexually transmitted...