Forced vaginal sex and genital immune correlates of HIV risk: a prospective study of female sex workers in Kenya
James Pollock, Mary Kung’u, Suji Udayakumar, Sanja Huibner, Rhoda Kabuti, Hellen Babu, Erastus Irungu, Polly Ngurukiri, Peter Muthoga, Wendy Adhiambo, Helen A Weiss, Janet Seeley, Tanya Abramsky, Joshua Kimani, Tara S Beattie, Rupert Kaul, Maisha Fiti Study Champions · 2025
Read Forced vaginal sex and genital immune correlates of HIV risk: a prospective study of female sex workers in Kenya by James Pollock, Mary Kung’u, Suji Udayakumar, Sanja Huibner, Rhoda Kabuti, Hellen Babu, Erastus Irungu, Polly Ngurukiri, Peter Muthoga, Wendy Adhiambo, Helen A Weiss, Janet Seeley, Tanya Abramsky, Joshua Kimani, Tara S Beattie, Rupert Kaul, Maisha Fiti Study Champions (2025) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-12718569.txt.
Description
James Pollock and co-authors study whether forced vaginal sex leaves a biological trace that raises HIV risk in female sex workers in Nairobi, Kenya. The cohort study followed 746 women not living with HIV across up to three visits. At each visit women reported any forced sex in the past week, and lab tests measured inflammation signals and a marker of barrier damage in vaginal samples.
At the first visit, six percent reported forced sex in the past week, and it clustered with childhood adversity, mental health strain, and poverty. Recent forced sex came with clearly raised genital inflammation, nearly triple the odds after adjustment. The barrier marker did not change, and recent consensual sex showed no such link. Inflammation stayed up for at least a week. The authors urge HIV programs serving violence survivors to treat this hidden risk window.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | James Pollock, Mary Kung’u, Suji Udayakumar, Sanja Huibner, Rhoda Kabuti, Hellen Babu, Erastus Irungu, Polly Ngurukiri, Peter Muthoga, Wendy Adhiambo, Helen A Weiss, Janet Seeley, Tanya Abramsky, Joshua Kimani, Tara S Beattie, Rupert Kaul, Maisha Fiti Study Champions |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2025 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 35 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |