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: Introduction: East African cross‐border areas are visited by mobile and vulnerable populations, such as men, female sex workers, men who have sex with men, truck drivers, fisher folks and young women. These groups may not benefit from traditional HIV prevention interventions available at the health facilities where they live, but may benefit from services offered at public venues identified as places where people meet new sexual partners (e.g. bars, nightclubs, transportation hubs and guest houses). The goal of this analysis was to estimate availability, access and uptake of prevention services by populations who visit these venues. Methods: We collected cross‐sectional data using the Priorities for Local AIDS Control Efforts sampling method at cross‐border locations near or along the land and lake borders of Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda from June 2016–February 2017. This bio‐behavioural survey captured information from a probability sample of 11,428 individuals at 833 venues across all areas. Data were weighted using survey sampling weights and analysed using methods to account for the complex sampling design. Results: Among the 85.6% of persons who had access to condoms, 60.5% did not use a condom at their last anal or vaginal sexual encounter. Venues visited by high percentages of persons living with HIV were not more likely than other venues to offer condoms. In 12 of the 22 cross‐border areas, male or female condoms were available at less than 33% of the venues visited by persons having difficulty accessing condoms. In 17 of the 22 cross‐border areas, education outreach visits in the preceding six months occurred at less than 50% of the venues where participants had low effective use of condoms. Conclusions: Individuals visiting venues in cross‐border areas report poor access to and low effective use of condoms and other prevention services. Availability of HIV prevention services differed by venue and population type and cross‐border area, suggesting opportunities for more granular targeting of HIV prevention interventions and transnational coordination of HIV programming., INTRODUCTION Achieving the UNAIDS 2030 goals to reduce new HIV infections to 200,000 per year will require optimization of HIV prevention and testing [1]. While HIV treatment has been crucial [...]

Pooled testing has been successfully used to expand SARS-CoV-2 testing, especially in settings requiring high volumes of screening of lower-risk individuals, but efficiency of pooling declines as prevalence rises. We propose a differentiated pooling strategy that independently optimizes pool sizes for distinct groups with different probabilities of infection to further improve the efficiency of pooled testing. We compared the efficiency (results obtained per test kit used) of the differentiated strategy with a traditional pooling strategy in which all samples are processed using uniform pool sizes under a range of scenarios. For most scenarios, differentiated pooling is more efficient than traditional pooling. In scenarios examined here, an improvement in efficiency of up to 3.94 results per test kit could be obtained through differentiated versus traditional pooling, with more likely scenarios resulting in 0.12 to 0.61 additional results per kit. Under circumstances similar to those observed in a university setting, implementation of our strategy could result in an improvement in efficiency between 0.03 to 3.21 results per test kit. Our results can help identify settings, such as universities and workplaces, where differentiated pooling can conserve critical testing resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attention to sexual misconduct has focused on acquaintance rape, leaving a need for research on less highly recognizable forms of harm. We estimated institution of higher education (IHE)-specific prevalence of yellow zone sexual harassment (SH) among students at 27 IHEs. We then examined SH and perceived risk of sexual assault/misconduct, knowledge regarding policies/resources, and perceptions of sexual misconduct response. Between 37.1% and 55.7% of students experienced SH. Harassed students were much more likely than non-harassed students to feel at risk for sexual misconduct and to have negative views of sexual misconduct response. Implications for research, policy, and prevention/response are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2006, beekeepers have reported increased losses of Apis mellifera colonies, and one factor that has been potentially implicated in these losses is the microsporidian Nosema ceranae. Since N. ceranae is a fairly recently discovered parasite, there is little knowledge of the variation in infection levels among individual workers within a colony. In this study we examined the levels of infection in individual bees from five colonies over three seasons using both spore counting and quantitative real-time PCR. The results show considerable intra-colony variation in infection intensity among individual workers with a higher percentage of low-level infections detected by PCR than by spore counting. Colonies generally had the highest percentage of infected bees in early summer (June) and the lowest levels in the fall (September). Nosema apis was detected in only 16/705 bees (2.3%) and always as a low-level co-infection with N. ceranae. The results also indicate that intra-colony variation in infection levels could influence the accuracy of Nosema diagnosis.