Advances in Multilevel Approaches to Understanding the Epidemiology and Prevention of Sexually Transmitted Infections and HIV: An Overview

Abstract

The distribution of sexually transmitted infections (STIs), including HIV infection, across individuals and subgroups within societies and across populations still preoccupies scientists of multiple disciplinary backgrounds. Systematic observation of how such distributions change over time in the presence and absence of preventive interventions underscores the complex, almost mysterious, multilevel multifactorial causation of the epidemiological profile of STIs. The importance of attention to both the individual- and population-level factors that cause and prevent chronic and communicable diseases has been emphasized elsewhere [1, 2]