In March, the CUNY ISPH Extreme Weather team hosted a session in advance of the International Workshop on HIV and Hepatitis Observational Databases (IWHOD) in Toledo, Spain as part of the WEATHERing HIV study, a project that builds on the IeDEA collaboration’s of more than twenty years of longitudinal data on HIV care to examine how extreme weather affects care outcomes among people living with HIV. The aims of the project are to a) characterize the associations between Extreme Weather Events (EWEs) and subsequent HIV care outcomes, b) elucidate mechanisms of impact and factors that may modify the effects of EWEs, and c) publicly disseminate a curated and processed country-level dataset.
The research team members in attendance included CUNY ISPH investigators and research staff Denis Nash, Ellen Brazier, Sophia Arabadjis, Sarah Kulkarni, and Elijah Baker, as well as co-investigator Frank Davenport from UC Santa Barbara’s Climate Hazards Center. Their session, titled “Advancing climate-related research within the IeDEA cohort collaboration”, was attended by over 30 public health researchers inside and outside of the IeDEA network.
The ISPH Extreme Weather team’s presentation included a brief summary of the WEATHERing HIV study, their preliminary quantitative work conducted to date, including a global analysis describing the burden of drought and flood exposures around IeDEA clinic sites from 1980-2024, and an on-going systematic review of studies evaluating extreme weather events and their impact on either HIV health outcomes or transmission pathways. Sophia Arabadjis also demonstrated a first look at a novel, public-use dataset that other researchers will be able to use to assess the likelihood of exposure to extreme weather events for other analysis. The session concluded with a group discussion where participants brainstormed ways to enhance scientific collaboration on public health and extreme weather, and shared input on desired features and uses for the WEATHERing public-use dataset.
At IWHOD, Sophia Arabadjis presented a poster of recent work on the WEATHERing HIV study. The poster presentation covered extreme weather events, such as droughts, that present numerous direct and indirect threats to people living with HIV. Ellen Brazier also presented a poster, her’s on changes in ART adherence support and monitoring across a diverse global cohort of HIV clinics.
The WEATHERing team is busy synthesizing useful feedback from the side session and incorporating it into their plans for the dataset. The WEATHERing HIV study is currently initiating qualitative research in the Philippines and Rwanda, conducting data analysis on its ongoing systematic review, and continuing to develop their climate exposures dataset. They plan to have it ready for trial use by other researchers in early 2026.
