Awareness and attitudes of pre-exposure prophylaxis for HIV prevention among physicians in Guatemala: Implications for country-wide implementation.

ABSTRACT:

Introduction

HIV continues to be a major health concern with approximately 2.1 million new infections occurring worldwide in 2015. In Central America, Guatemala had the highest incident number of HIV infections (3,700) in 2015. Antiretroviral pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) was recently recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) as an efficacious intervention to prevent HIV transmission. PrEP implementation efforts are underway in Guatemala and success will require providers that are knowledgeable and willing to prescribe PrEP. We sought to explore current PrEP awareness and prescribing attitudes among Guatemalan physicians in order to inform future PrEP implementation efforts.

Methods

We conducted a cross-sectional survey of adult internal medicine physicians at the

SUBMITTER: Ross I 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5336255 | biostudies-literature | 2017

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature