Participation Rates in HIV Vaccine Trials Possibly Affected by Misconceptions
Researchers who work on HIV vaccines face a major challenge: convincing members of at-risk communities to volunteer for these trials. To determine why participation rates in these communities are so low, University of Toronto researchers surveyed nine focus groups comprising at-risk individuals, and found they held a set of misconceptions.On December 1st, World AIDS Day 2011 will be observed in many countries around the globe. The theme of this year’s World AIDS Day is “Getting to Zero”—specifically, zero new HIV infections, zero discrimination and zero AIDS-related deaths. A key tool in