Assessing the Cost-effectiveness of Alternative Approaches to HIV Prevention

Abstract

Evaluating the comparative cost effectiveness of alternative HIV prevention strategies will be an important priority. Public health dollars are limited and the HIV epidemic continues to grow, so it will be very important to spend those dollars in ways that maximize the number of HIV infections averted. Indeed, spending HIV prevention dollars in a cost-effective manner was a key recommendation in a recent Institute of Medicine report (IOM, 2000). What makes cost-effectiveness analyses particularly challenging in the face of multiple approaches will be the importance of matching at-risk individual, community or country to the most cost-effective prevention strategies for that entity. For example, sexual compulsivity affects a relatively small number of individuals, but those individuals may be "core transmitters" or highly at risk for infection. Cost-effective use of pharmacologic treatments (should they prove effective) must be matched to those few who would benefit from them, and it may be worth spending considerable resources to achieve this matching. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)