Quarraisha Abdool Karim: investigating HIV/AIDS in South Africa. Interview by Priva Shetty.

摘要

Since the start of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. South African epidemiologist Quarraisha Abdool Karim has helped to understand how the disease is decimating her country's population, most notably by investigating how the epidemic affects women and how to prevent its spread through greater engagement with communities and participants in HIV prevention trials.While studying in the USA for a masters degree at Columbia University in 1988, under the mentorship of Zena Stein, Abdool Karim became aware of the two different HIV epidemics in New York: one prevalent in men who have sex with men and the other among injecting drug users. In 1989, she returned to a South Africa "on the brink of political change" and shortly thereafter investigated the prevalence of HIV in the general population; it turned out to be less than 1% at that time, but subsequent surveys soon "hinted at the rapidity with which HIV was spreading", she recalls. Not only was HIV spreading, but it was three times more common in women than in men. As an activist during apartheid, Abdool Karim was attuned to issues of injustice; realising that social inequality meant that HIV/AIDS affected women disproportionately she pursued research aimed at unravelling this gender difference, including how sexual and reproductive rights and access to services affect HIV acquisition.