Grant: Operating Grant - PA: HIV/AIDS Bridge Funding - Health Services/Pop Hlth Stream

Sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and HIV are important public health problems globally. These epidemics have been described as concentrated in traditional high risk groups (THRG) such are men who have sex with men (MSM), sex workers and drug injectors, and generalized, which affects groups other than THRG, such are heterosexual women and men. Those two types of epidemics are simultaneously present in Canada and Colombia, and may be mainly explained by social circumstances: gender, ethnicity, poverty, structural and personal violence, and stigma, among other factors. We propose to identify the main social factors that explain the high levels of HIV, gonorrhea, chlamydia and syphilis infection among MSM and Trans, and in heterosexual women and men from poor and ethnic minorities in Colombia. We will examine: 1) the main social, neighbourhood, community and geographical actors influencing the risk of HIV/STIs, 2) the relationship between sexual network (with whom they have sex, how many concurrent partners they have) and risk of HIV/STIs, and 3) the main personal factors (i.e. behaviours, social circumstances, experience of violence) influencing the risk of HIV/STIs, and how they are shaped by contextual and social network structures. Our research will focus in the role play by gender and race/ethnicity in all above described associations. With this information we will propose interventions to reduce the burden and the inequities in health produced by HIV and the other STIs in Colombia.