VCU Receives NIH Grant to Understand HIV/STDs in At-Risk Populations in China

By Sathya Achia Abraham

Virginia Commonwealth University has received a National Institutes of Health grant totaling $1.56 million to examine the HIV and sexually transmitted diseases epidemics, and personal and social determinants that influence risky behavior among older female sex workers in China.

In China, HIV and STDs are spreading among the older adult population, and experts believe this may be driven, in part, by female sex workers who are 35 years old or older because the majority of HIV-infected older adults have reported a history of commercial sex with these women. The China Ministry of Health has called for HIV/STD interventions for older adults, seeing that this issue is a significant public health problem. However, the lack of epidemiologic data from community-based studies available has been a challenge.

Through this four-year international project, which in addition to VCU, includes the University of California, Los Angeles; Johns Hopkins University; Shandong University in China; and Nanning Center for Disease Control and Prevention in China, researchers hope to gather data to develop an HIV/STD intervention to target older female sex workers in China – a population considered to be a main source of HIV/STD transmission in that country.

“This is the first large-scale, multi-site study examining the extent of how HIV and STDs spread in this unique and stigmatized population in China,” said principal investigator, Hongjie Liu, Ph.D., associate professor of epidemiology in the VCU School of Medicine.

“The findings of this study may lead to the development of intervention strategies that will target the determinants to sexual risk among older female sex workers, and ultimately reduce sexual transmission of HIV/STDs to the older adult population,” he said.

According to Liu, who has studied the social and behavioral aspects involved in the spread of HIV and sexually transmitted disease for 12 years, the team will conduct a community-based survey of 1,200 older female sex workers recruited from their social network peers in three cities in China.

The study will qualitatively describe environmental and social network factors for risks in this population, determine to what extent the epidemics of HIV/STDs have spread in the group and then investigate the roles of social network components, including relationships with peers, social support, or social norms and regulations and working environmental factors on behaviors.