Womens Interagency HIV Study

The State University of New York Health Science Center at Brooklyn (SUNY-HSCB), in collaboration with the five other WIHS sites, has successfully responded to the evolving epidemic of HIV infection among women by rapidly establishing research protocols, developing and piloting instruments and recruiting a national cohort highly representative of the population of HIV infected women in this country. The SUNY cohort reached, and surpassed, its original recruitment goal in June 1995 and currently has 398 women entered (311 seropositive; 87 seronegative). As of visit three our loss to follow-up rate was only 5.1 percent (4.2 percent for the seropositive cohort). We are now proposing to combine continued follow-up of this cohort with new scientific investigations and comprehensive, detailed analyses. These analyses will bring state of the art technologies to bear on a cohort which reflects the current "face" of the HIV epidemic, an epidemic which has changed in three basic ways in the decade since the first AIDS cohorts were assembled - gender, risk groups and therapeutic interventions. Our cohort is positioned to address the emerging scientific questions which those changes will engender.