HIV is perhaps the defining epidemic of our age. We have known almost since the start of the epidemic how the virus is transmitted, and we have simple and affordable ways of preventing it: condoms, clean needles, screened blood. And yet the world has more than sixty million prevention failures to its credit – a number that is hard to grasp in terms of women and men, sons and lovers, mothers, mentors friends and colleagues.

HIV is an epidemic driven in part by advocacy. We have become so lost in the enormity of the problem that we have translated it into a problem of development, of gender inequality, of poverty. There is no doubt that HIV aggravates all of these things, and is aggravated by them. But it is a virus – an infectious agent that gets passed from an infected person to an uninfected person through a handful of well-known behaviours.

We will only begin to make inroads against HIV if we focus more clearly on the situations in which infected people are having sex and injecting drugs with uninfected people. We need to provide services for people in those situations, focusing on helping them to avoid risk altogether, or to reduce the likelihood that the virus will be passed on if risk does occur.

Elizabeth Pisani’s work in HIV has centred on helping countries to create systems that improve their understanding of the epidemic. She has worked with UNAIDS, WHO, Family Health International and others to develop surveillance guidelines and tools, and has worked with the governments of Indonesia, China and other countries to put those tools into action.

This page contains links to official guidelines and documents and published and unpublished papers to which Elizabeth contributed. Please note that more up-to-date versions of many of these reports are available on the websites of the publishing organisations, which can be found on the Links page.

Various types of documents are listed:

Epidemiological reports on HIV: These include reports on the epidemic worldwide, and in specific countries. Many are published by international organisations or national AIDS programmes. Most are written for a general audience, and are a fairly easy read.

Scientific publications on HIV: Papers on which Elizabeth Pisani is a co-author, published in scientific journals. These tend to be rather technical, and are sometimes dull.

Surveillance tools: These documents form a collection of tools and guidance for those planning or implementing HIV surveillance and surveillance of the risk behaviours that influence the spread of the virus. They come from various institutions and sources, and are most useful for countries where HIV is concentrated among men and women who buy and sell sex, drug injectors and men who have sex with men (in other words, most countries outside of sub-Saharan Africa.

Elizabeth has recently focused on training colleagues in the analysis and presentation of data generated by second generation surveillance systems. Links will eventually be provided to a number of PowerPoint presentations, prepared by Elizabeth or by analysis teams with whom she worked.