Press releases

February 4, 2019 Consistent daily use of pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, can reduce the risk of HIV infection by 92 percent, but the drug becomes much less effective when taken inconsistently. Adhering to a daily regimen of any medication can be a challenge, so to assist health care providers in treating patients at risk for contracting HIV, CUNY SPH Professor Christian Grov, DPH student Javier Lopez-Rios, and MPH student Alexa D’Angelo co-led a study into the strategies PrEP users can employ to remember to stay on track with their daily doses. The study was published in the journ...

February 1, 2019 A group of researchers, led by the CUNY ISPH, published a consensus statement on research priorities to inform the implementation of universal HIV treatment programs in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) in the latest issue of the Journal of the International AIDS Society (JIAS). The article distills the outcomes of a research prioritization process involving over 200 researchers, implementation experts, policy/decision-makers, and HIV community representatives working in East, Central, Southern and West Africa who were convened by the IeDEA Consortium at a 2017 meeting in Kigali, Rw...

January 14, 2019 Truck drivers in sub-Saharan Africa are especially vulnerable to infection with HIV due to contact with multiple sexual partners—often including sex workers—along their trucking routes. Accessing HIV testing can be a challenge for truckers due to their mobility and long working hours, as well as concerns about confidentiality and stigma. CUNY SPH researchers Dr. Elizabeth Kelvin, Associate Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, and DPH candidate Matthew Romo are exploring HIV self-testing as a way to increase testing rates in this high-risk population. The research...

November 19, 2018 There is a long-standing belief that colorectal cancer (CRC), which causes some 50,000 deaths in the United States each year, can be categorized into distinct molecular subtypes. In a paper published recently in the journal Genome Biology, CUNY SPH Associate Professor and ISPH Investigator Levi Waldron and colleagues proposed an approach to scoring tumors that can help to better differentiate patients who may differ in their exposures, outcomes, and optimal treatments. In the study, the authors re-processed and standardized individual patient gene expression data for mo...

Nearly all countries in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) have adopted national polices for universal HIV treatment, regardless of CD4 cell count or clinical stage. Evidence to date from SSA suggests that, once linked to care, timely ART initiation with retention and viral suppression is the norm. However, ART initiation in SSA usually occurs late in the course of infection, driving up mortality and new infection rates. With 10.3 million people untreated and a projected 1.2M new infections per year in SSA, the universal treatment era presents strategic opportunities for health systems to substantially ...

For immediate release: November 8, 2018 Study finds persistent discrepancies in cigarette smoking between those with mental health and substance use problems and those without Between 2005 and 2014, nondaily cigarette use increased among persons with common mental health and substance use problems (MHSUP), according to a new study in The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry lead by Renee Goodwin, Deputy Director of the Institute for Implementation Science in Population Health. “Historically, non-daily or infrequent smoking was not considered a great concern, and attention was focused primarily...

September 4, 2018 In a new paper published in the journal Clinical Cancer Research, CUNY SPH Associate Professor Levi Waldron and colleagues resolved the long-standing controversy over how to define molecular subtypes of high-grade serous ovarian carcinoma, the most common form of ovarian cancer and the fifth leading cause of cancer deaths in the United States. Understanding molecular subtypes of common forms of cancer is important because clinically similar cases may differ in their genetic underpinnings, causes, and outcomes. “Lumping together potentially different diseases just because...