Chair
Gigi Santow (Australia)

Membership
Brent Wolff (USA)
KG Santhya (India)

Council Liaison
John Cleland

Contact auprès du Secrétariat de l'UIESP
Paul Monet

Terms of Reference

The aims of this Scientific Panel are first, to stimulate research on important links between sexual behaviour and the creation, evolution and maintenance of HIV/AIDS epidemics, and secondly, to disseminate the resulting research findings. Close to 40 million people world wide are now estimated to be HIV positive, two-thirds of these being in sub-Saharan Africa where transmission is largely through heterosexual sex. In focusing on sexual behaviour the panel signals the importance of such behaviour for the HIV/AIDS pandemic, while recognizing that of all aspects of human behaviour, accurate information on sexual behaviour is probably the most difficult to collect. The Panel recognizes also that the nature of the human immunodeficiency virus, in combination with the generally adverse underlying health conditions in the countries in which HIV has taken the strongest hold, along with deficiencies in their health services and reporting systems, creates considerable difficulties even in the charting of individual epidemics, let alone in their interpretation.