Professor Ida Susser (Roosevelt House Faculty Associate and Hunter College Professor of Anthropology) published an OpEd piece on Al Jazeera Online this past week on the negative findings of a recent study on HIV in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM):

“Known as VOICE, or Vaginal and Oral Interventions to Control the Epidemic, the study failed to show any preventive results for women in southern Africa using ARV-based pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) pills or topical microbicide gel.

It’s a particularly unsettling failure because previous studies have demonstrated that these ARV-based methods work. Most of the women who participated in the VOICE study did not use the tablets or gel, but those who did were protected. In other words, the study failed not because the products didn’t work but because they weren’t used.”

Professor Susser implies that research design, rather than the subjects of the study, are to blame for the study’s failure, and makes the suggestion that social and behavioral factors are just as important as the medication itself.

Read the full article online at Al Jazeera.