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Toni Poteat at CROI: Transgender people at high HIV risk; little known about prevention, treatment

Posted on March 09, 2016

Toni Poteat at CROI: Transgender people at high HIV risk; little known about prevention, treatment

From HIVandHepatitis.com:

"Transgender women have among the highest rates of HIV infection, but little is known about HIV prevalence among trans men, Tonia Poteat from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health said in a plenary lecture on transgender health and HIV at the recent Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI 2016)in Boston -- the first ever on this population at CROI. A growing number of studies and prevention and treatment programs are addressing transgender populations, but more research is needed.

Poteat noted that while mainstream knowledge about transgender men and women is relatively new in the U.S. and Europe, largely thanks to celebrities such as Chaz Bono, Laverne Cox, and Caitlyn Jenner, people outside the male-female gender binary have long existed in many cultures, such as the hijra in India."

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