Comprehensive, up-to-date information on HIV/AIDS treatment, prevention, and policy from the University of California San Francisco

PANCEA is an NIH-funded research project designed to provide information to help increase the efficiency of HIV prevention programs. PANCEA has studied prevention in five countries. PANCEA analyzed output, cost, and quality data from 200 prevention program sites. Of these 40 will undergo particularly intensive analysis.

PANCEA collected and analyzed HIV prevention cost and output data from five countries: India, Russia, Mexico, South Africa, and Uganda.

These countries were chosen to represent a wide range of geographical settings, epidemic stages, and cultural contexts. No one study can fully represent the large number of settings in which the epidemic occurs. These five offer a range and diversity that will help investigators understand how variations along these dimensions affect the efficiency of various HIV prevention strategies.

PANCEA is investigating eight prevention modalities. These are:

Voluntary counseling and testing (VCT); Preventing mother to child transmission prevention (PMTCT); Sex worker programs; Treatment of sexually transmitted infection; Harm reduction for IDUs; Condom social marketing; Information, education, and communication (IEC), especially with mass media; and, Schools-based programs.

These eight were selected because they are commonly part of the core prevention response to the HIV epidemic in most countries. For several, there is a substantial body of scientific evidence suggesting that they are effective. For others including IEC, condom social marketing and schools-based programs, the evidence of effectiveness is less clear. Nevertheless, sizable portions of the total HIV prevention budget are being spent on these three interventions, and this alone makes them worth understanding better.

PANCEA does not examine HIV treatment programs. Clearly, programs to provide antiretroviral therapy and to treat opportunistic infections are of great public health importance. They also command an increasing portion of total HIV-related spending. PANCEA does not study them in order to keep the scope of its work within manageable proportions.