Inovação na prevenção do VIH na Europa: incorporação e expressão de tecnologias de saúde emergentes entre homens gay, bissexuais e outros homens que têm sexo com homens

Our research project aims to provide evidence on how public health response to the HIV epidemic can be enhanced by addressing gaps in policy implementation and consequent inequities in access to innovation in HIV prevention. The research project aligns with the actions and prevention pillars outlined by the HIV Prevention 2025 roadmap to address the inequalities hindering progress in the HIV response. The roadmap described the current HIV response situation as marked by persistent inequalities, multiple pandemics, economic challenges, limited space for civil society activities, and human rights violations. Our project aligns more closely with two pillars: one that emphasizes the need to establish mechanisms that facilitate the swift implementation of new HIV prevention technologies and program innovations, and the other that focuses on access and scale-up of ART-based prevention, such as PrEP and TasP. We hypothesize that scaling up PrEP and TasP can be achieved by resolving policy, regulatory, logistical, and guidance challenges and ensuring that new technologies are swiftly implemented and remain available and affordable over time. Hence, our project aims to explore how eight EU/EEA plus Switzerland countries' PrEP and TasP policies adoption and implementation and overarching human rights-related issues are reflected in actual knowledge and current use of those preventive tools among GBMSM. We also aim to provide an experimental data setting to project HIV incidence—viewed as an emergent population-level property that arises as a function of individual-level agent behaviors and interactions— in a simulated dynamic sexual network of GBMSM to understand what set of interventions are required to achieve the ultimate goal of reducing transmission to a level where it no longer threatens public health. We will employ a broad range of cutting-edge methodological approaches that are adequate for our research questions and that have seldom been used to address these questions in the context of the HIV epidemic in these European countries - Belgium, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland. These countries face a concentrated epidemic where GBMSM share a disproportionate burden of HIV but for whom preventive services are usually available. So, we aim to understand what, even in this favorable context, hinders the public health response to HIV and how to optimize it.