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British HIV cure survey: most respondents would be prepared to take some health risk to help find a cure for HIV
Gus Cairns, 2014-11-28 07:40:00
An online survey that asked people living with HIV, largely from the UK, whether they would participate in HIV cure research has found that the majority of participants would. Furthermore, they would be prepared to tolerate fairly significant risks to their health as long as they were explained clearly. The majority would also be prepared to take part in research that offered them no personal benefit, and to take part in treatment interruptions.
The opinion survey was conducted by the English research consortium CHERUB (Collaborative HIV Eradication of Reservoirs: UK Biomedical Research Centres), a collaboration of three hospitals in London and one each in Oxford and Cambridge.
It was devised because there has only ever been one previous community survey done on what people with HIV think about cure research – a US-based one conducted by Project Inform that published its findings at the International AIDS Conference in Washington DC in 2012.
The Project Inform survey asked people if they would be willing to participate in HIV cure research that offered them no personal benefit and found that the majority would be at least “somewhat interested”, and 45% “interested” or “very interested” in participating. Predictors of willingness to be involved for altruistic reasons included being African-American or Latino, being younger (age over 60 was negatively associated with altruism), knowledgeable about HIV, with a low income, and with a low CD4 count.
Interestingly, many of these associations seem to apply to the CHERUB survey too.
Source:1
