Reducing HIV infection among youth: What can schools do? Key baseline findings from Mexico, South Africa, and Thailand

Although many program planners see schools as a convenient location for HIV-prevention programs, there is controversy about whether school programs can ever be strong enough to go beyond improving knowledge and attitudes to increasing the adoption of safe sexual behaviors. Evaluations of school programs in Mexico, South Africa, and Thailand focus on this question: Can school HIV programs change behavior? In each country, local organizations have worked with educators on teacher training and course design to ensure high-quality school interventions. Researchers surveyed students’ knowledge, attitudes, norms, and reported behavior before the intervention, immediately after the intervention, and again several months later to measure retention of program effects. In all three sites comparable control groups are compared to the intervention group. The mean age and age ranges for the three study groups are: 16 years and 13–23 for the Mexican study group; 15 years and 8 months and ages 12–21 for the South African study group; and 20 years and ages 17–31 for the Thai study group. This report is a summary of key baseline findings from these studies

Study of the Electric Energy Consumption of the Science Center Building

This research aimed to study the status of energy consumption in terms of electric energy consumption and specific energy consumption (SEC) of the Science Center Building, Suan Sunandha Rajabhat University, Bangkok, Thailand. It was found the electric energy consumption in 2012 was 77,818 kWh. The specific energy consumption was 27.91 MJ/m2 . It needed to have an energy conservation measure for the electric system for short-term measures. For the longterm, the electric system installation was regularly improved and maintained

Programming for HIV prevention among college students in Thailand

As national education programs incorporate HIV prevention into school curricula, policymakers and educators need to know what they can expect from these initiatives. Can such courses influence the behavior of students as well as their knowledge and attitudes? If not, what can these courses reasonably be expected to accomplish, and what part can they play in overall HIV programming for youth? To help answer these questions, the Thai Ministry of Education, the Program for Appropriate Technology in Health (PATH), and the Horizons Program embarked on a study to examine the outcomes of a school-based HIV/AIDS program for Thai college students. The curriculum for the “Teens on Smart Sex” Program consists of eight two-hour sessions conducted once a week among college-age students. As noted in this brief, the program successfully improved students’ HIV-related knowledge and attitudes about people living with HIV/AIDS. It also improved female students’ attitudes about condom use and increased actual use. There was no evidence, however, of the adoption of other protective behaviors, such as abstinence, among males and females. Evaluation findings are being used to strengthen course activities so that course impact can result in greater behavior change