PLoS medicine
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Uganda is one of the few African countries where rates of HIV infection have fallen, from about 15 percent in the early 1990s to about five percent in 2001. At the end of 2005, UNAIDS estimated that 6.7 percent of adults were infected with the virus. The reasons behind Uganda's success have been intensely studied in the hope that other countries can emulate the strategies that worked. ⋯ Uganda receives funds from the United States President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which promotes the ABC approach with a focus on abstinence-driven public health campaigns. Other researchers question whether the ABC approach was really responsible for the decline in HIV infection. Critics of the ABC approach also argue that by emphasizing abstinence over condom use, the approach leaves women at risk of infection, because in many parts of the world women are not empowered to insist on abstinence or fidelity.
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Review Comparative Study
Patient outcomes with teaching versus nonteaching healthcare: a systematic review.
Extensive debate exists in the healthcare community over whether outcomes of medical care at teaching hospitals and other healthcare units are better or worse than those at the respective nonteaching ones. Thus, our goal was to systematically evaluate the evidence pertaining to this question. ⋯ The available data are limited by their nonrandomized design, but overall they do not suggest that a healthcare facility's teaching status on its own markedly improves or worsens patient outcomes. Differences for specific diseases cannot be excluded, but are likely to be small.
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The authors discuss a new systematic review that found no difference in health outcomes between academic and nonacademic health care settings.
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Pappas discusses a new study that examines US health disparities using county-level data.
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Comparative Study
Birth outcome in women with previously treated breast cancer--a population-based cohort study from Sweden.
Data on birth outcome and offspring health after the appearance of breast cancer are limited. The aim of this study was to assess the risk of adverse birth outcomes in women previously treated for invasive breast cancer compared with the general population of mothers. ⋯ It is reassuring that births overall were without adverse events, but our findings indicate that pregnancies in previously treated breast cancer patients should possibly be regarded as higher risk pregnancies, with consequences for their surveillance and management.