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The Cochrane Collaborative Review Group on HIV Infection and AIDS (Cochrane HIV/AIDS Group) is one of 52 Collaborative Review Groups of the Cochrane Collaboration. The Cochrane HIV/AIDS Group, with editorial bases at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and the South African Medical Research Council (MRC), Cape Town, South Africa, brings together individuals from around the world who share an interest in preparing, disseminating, and updating systematic reviews of rigorous HIV/AIDS prevention, treatment, palliative care and pain management research as well as enhancing the science of evidence-based health care. As of this writing in February 2009, we have 53 completed systematic reviews and 50 reviews in progress in all areas of HIV prevention, treatment, palliative care, and health care services. About 30 of the reviews in progress are at advanced stages of completion. We work very closely with our satellite editorial base at the South Africa Cochrane Centre, and have developed a mentoring program with them to assist new authors in sub-Saharan Africa. This helps African researchers to learn the process of conducting a systematic review, and helps us to be sure that the reviews we are conducting are relevant to the areas of the world most impacted by the AIDS pandemic. We have also helped to re-establish the Cochrane Sexually Transmitted Diseases Group in Porto Alegre, Brazil, with Dr. Mauro Ramos of the Centro por Estudos de AIDS/DST do Rio Grande do Sul (CEARGS). We work with policy makers at the national and international levels to disseminate the results of our reviews, and have produced documents used by the Council on Foreign Relations, the Institute of Medicine, South Africa’s Treatment Action Coalition, South Africa’s MRC (at a national level), the US State Department, the World Health Organization, and various other national and international non-governmental organizations

In collaboration with the Caribbean HIV/AIDS Alliance and Intrahealth, CAPS is working in four Eastern Caribbean countries to enhance the response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The USAID-funded Eastern Caribbean Community Action Project (EC-CAP) supports prevention, development and use of strategic information, roll-out of community-based counseling and testing, and provision of care services (palliative and home based care). As one of three partners, the CAPS team’s specific aims are:

1. To identify the barriers and facilitators to access and delivery of HIV prevention, testing, and treatment services (Antigua-Barbuda, Barbados, St. Vincent-Grenadines)
2. To assess the feasibility and acceptability of prevention interventions for different population groups at risk for HIV (St Kitts-Nevis, Barbados)
3. To provide technical support and capacity building to improve regional, country and programmatic monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems for assessing the quality and impact of HIV services (all countries)

CAPS is providing specific expertise and technical support to design a series of special studies to:

• Describe HIV risk and health seeking behavior
• Conduct studies on implementation and scale-up community-based HIV counseling and testing
• Train local prevention providers on monitoring and evaluation systems, data use and program planning
• Provide local organizations with technical assistance in strategic information, package findings and recommendations of the evaluations into best practice publications
• Disseminate the publications at the international, regional, and national level

This research will evaluate how high-risk clusters and current prevention strategies affect HIV transmission patterns. There are a number of potential drivers of the epidemic, including substance use, undiagnosed infections and high number of sexual partners. However, it still remains unclear which drivers contribute to the epidemic with HIV transmission as the biological outcome. The study aims to characterize HIV clusters and correlates associated with transmission. Phylogenetic analysis will be performed to assess transmission clusters. Qualitative interviews will be conducted to describe the psychosocial and behavioral contexts associated with transmission.

=The Mpowerment Project is a model HIV prevention program that has been specifically designed to address the needs of young gay and bisexual men. Read about the newest adaptations to MP to address HIV prevention for men living with HIV and the use of PrEP, in what we are calling MP+. Learn how the Mpowerment Project fits into the National HIV/AIDS Strategy here (pdf), find out more about the Project, or read some of the research papers on the Project's effectiveness.

CAPS and the AIDS Project East Bay (APEB) will build a coalition of health sciences investigators at UCSF, community-based organizations that serve the African American community, and community members to answer significant scientific STI/HIV research questions. We aim to:

• Develop a research coalition to identify significant research questions and design, implement and disseminate appropriate and scientifically-rigorous research projects that address STI/HIV health disparities in the African American community
• Increase the capacity of the members of the research coalition to participate in community collaborative research projects through relationship building activities, specialized trainings and forums
• Develop an electronic infrastructure to support, grow and ensure sustainability of the coalition and activities by archiving coalition trainings and forums, facilitating communication among coalition members, and providing a forum for support and problem-solving among the subgroups of the coalition
• Stimulate and develop innovative research by providing funding to conduct pilot research that will yield data for collaborative presentations at national conferences and provide preliminary data for use by academic and CBO researchers when submitting future R01 grant proposals to NIH.