Ending the HIV Epidemic: We Have the Tools, Do We Have the Will?

This Viewpoint identifies several barriers to ending the HIV epidemic and urges increasing expertise in HIV medicine in underserved areas like the South challenging legislation designed to keep students ignorant.

Emotions and emotion up-regulation during the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany.

In stressful situations such as the COVID-19-pandemic, unpleasant emotions are expected to increase while pleasant emotions will likely decrease. Little is known about the role cognitive appraisals, information management, and upregulating pleasant emotions can play to support emotion regulation in a pandemic. In an online survey (N = 1682), we investigated predictors of changes in pleasant and unpleasant emotions in a German sample (aged 18-88 years) shortly after the first restrictions were imposed. Crisis self-efficacy and felt restriction were predictors of changes in unpleasant emotions and joy alike. The application of emotion up-regulation strategies was weakly associated with changes in joy. Among the different upregulation strategies, only "savouring the moment" predicted changes in joy. Our study informs future research perspectives assessing the role of upregulating pleasant emotions under challenging circumstances.

Community trust of government and non-governmental organizations during the 2014-16 Ebola epidemic in Liberia.

The West African Ebola Virus Disease epidemic of 2014-16 cost more than 11,000 lives. Interventions targeting key behaviors to curb transmission, such as safe funeral practices and reporting and isolating the ill, were initially unsuccessful in a climate of fear, mistrust, and denial. Building trust was eventually recognized as essential to epidemic response and prioritized, and trust was seen to improve toward the end of the epidemic as incidence fell. However, little is understood about how and why trust changed during Ebola, what factors were most influential to community trust, and how different institutions might have been perceived under different levels of exposure to the outbreak. In this large-N household survey conducted in Liberia in 2018, we measured self-reported trust over time retrospectively in three different communities with different exposures to Ebola. We found trust was consistently higher for non-governmental organizations than for the government of Liberia across all time periods. Trust reportedly decreased significantly from the start to the peak of the epidemic in the study site of highest Ebola incidence. This finding, in combination with a negative association found between knowing someone infected and trust of both iNGOs and the government, indicates the experience of Ebola may have itself caused a decline of trust in the community. These results suggest that national governments should aim to establish trust when engaging communities to change behavior during epidemics. Further research on the relationship between trust and epidemics may serve to improve epidemic response efficacy and behavior uptake.

Infodemics: A new challenge for public health.

The COVID-19 information epidemic, or "infodemic," demonstrates how unlimited access to information may confuse and influence behaviors during a health emergency. However, the study of infodemics is relatively new, and little is known about their relationship with epidemics management. Here, we discuss unresolved issues and propose research directions to enhance preparedness for future health crises.