Economic Evaluation of HIV/AIDS Education and Primary Prevention

摘要

Since at least the late 1980s, policymakers have questioned which strategies aremost cost-effective in preventing further HIV infection. Only in recent years has sufficient evidence of the efficacy and effectiveness of specific interventions accumulated to begin to support such analyses. Cost-effective analysis and other economic evaluations compare the costs and consequences of alternative strategies to assess whether the benefits gained are worth the resources invested. This paper identifies economic evaluations of HIV primary prevention measures in the United States, reviews their methods, and discusses their findings. The interventions range from HIV testing and counseling and partner notification to needle exchange and bleach distribution for injecting drug users. The paper concludes with an analysis of the applicability of economic evaluation methods to HIV prevention and the role of these evaluations in policy making.