HIV and AIDS in the Russian Federation : prisons as a case study of risk environments and agency

This thesis explores Russian prisons as risk environments for the spread of HIV through intravenous drug use. The Russian HIV epidemic is extremely fast growing, and though exact prevalence rates are unknown, the epidemic is now considered generalized as estimated prevalence rates exceed one percent of the Russian population. After decades of foreign-aid and interventions in African nations have largely failed to address the HIV epidemic, social scientists now attribute HIV infection to risk environments created by low levels of social cohesion and a lack of agency. Within my research, I explore Russian male prisons and the role risk environments and agency play in the spread of HIV. I review recently published literature, government statistics, as well as reports published by non-governmental organizations. I then analyze and interpret these data, draw conclusions and inferences regarding the spread of HIV within Russian prison risk environments.Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studie

Social representations of HIV/AIDS in five Central European and Eastern European countries: A multidimensional analysis

Cognitive processing models of risky sexual behaviour have proliferated in the two decades since the first reporting of HIV/AIDS, but far less attention has been paid to individual and group representations of the epidemic and the relationship between these representations and reported sexual behaviours. In this study, 494 business people and medics from Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Poland and Russia sorted free associations around HIV/AIDS in a matrix completion task. Exploratory factor and multidimensional scaling analyses revealed two main dimensions (labelled ‘Sex’ and ‘Deadly disease’), with significant cultural and gender variations along both dimension scores. Possible explanations for these results are discussed in the light of growing concerns over the spread of the epidemic in this region

Issues and Challenges of HIV/AIDS Prevention and Treatment Programme in Nepal

This paper explores some of the key issues and challenges of government HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment programme in Nepal. Providing HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment services in Nepal is associated with a number of issues and challenges which are shaped mostly on cultural and managerial issues from grass root to policy level. Numerous efforts have been done and going on by Nepal government and non-government organization but still HIV prevention and treatment service is not able to reach all the most at risk populations because cultural issues and managerial issues are obstructing the services. The existing socio-cultural frameworks of Nepal do not provide an environment for any safe disclosure for person who is HIV infected. Thus, there is an urgent need to address those issues and challenges and strengthen the whole spectrums of health systems through collaborative approach to achieve the millennium development goals. It will be the purpose of this paper to contribute to the policy makers by exploring the pertinent issues and challenges in the HIV/AIDS programme

Domino: exploring mobile collaborative software adaptation

Social Proximity Applications (SPAs) are a promising new area for ubicomp software that exploits the everyday changes in the proximity of mobile users. While a number of applications facilitate simple file sharing between co–present users, this paper explores opportunities for recommending and sharing software between users. We describe an architecture that allows the recommendation of new system components from systems with similar histories of use. Software components and usage histories are exchanged between mobile users who are in proximity with each other. We apply this architecture in a mobile strategy game in which players adapt and upgrade their game using components from other players, progressing through the game through sharing tools and history. More broadly, we discuss the general application of this technique as well as the security and privacy challenges to such an approach

An Agent-Based Spatially Explicit Epidemiological Model in MASON

This paper outlines the design and implementation of an agent-based epidemiological simulation system. The system was implemented in the MASON toolkit, a set of Java-based agent-simulation libraries. This epidemiological simulation system is robust and extensible for multiple applications, including classroom demonstrations of many types of epidemics and detailed numerical experimentation on a particular disease. The application has been made available as an applet on the MASON web site, and as source code on the author\'s web site.Epidemiology, Social Networks, Agent-Based Simulation, MASON Toolkit