The Human Immunodeficiency Virus, or HIV, epidemic represents one of the greatest public health challenges of the late 20th and now, early 21st century. According to the World Health Organization (2013), approximately 70 million people have been infected with HIV worldwide since the beginning of the epidemic and approximately 35 million people have perished. To date, great strides have been made therapeutically in the creation and distribution of HIV antiretrovirals (ARVs) that can keep viral levels low in the infected individual thus prolonging his/her life expectancy; however, in the absence of an effective vaccine, prevention still is the most viable method of combating the pandemic. As the greatest burden of the epidemic lies outside the United States, there have been a plethora of prevention programs that have been launched internationally to combat HIV infection. Programs offering voluntary counseling and testing, condom distribution, needle/syringe exchange, and antiretroviral distribution have shown success in reducing HIV incidence in a wide range of geographic locations, including developing countries, where they have been launched. While many of the concepts of the programs are not new to the United States; to date, most prevention efforts have been sporadic and focused at the state or local level as opposed to federally-funded, evidence-based prevention programs on a national scale. Utilizing information gleaned from other countries, and especially developing countries, a series of recommendations are presented for how to improve HIV prevention efforts in the United States. Barriers to implementation of these ideas are also discussed and methods to overcome these barriers are presented, including social marketing, a field of study and practice that can be potentially utilized to launch prevention efforts in the communities of individuals that are most at risk.Master of Public Healt
