Community Chats

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Community Chats

The Johns Hopkins Health System Office of Community Health offers Community Chats, an educational community outreach service. Expert speakers from the faculty and staff of the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions are available to address your organization from this listing of over 250 children's and adult health care topics.

Please read the Community Chats brochure to find the topic that best suits your group's needs and interests. The group size should be a minimum of 15 individuals. Requests must be made at least six weeks in advance. To make your request, please call 410-614-3661 between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. weekdays.

WAYS TO IMPROVE URBAN HEALTH

Understand hiv risk behaviors
Stepping Up Surveillance to Fight AIDS

A crew of interviewers takes to the streets of Baltimore on the trail of a tenacious disease.

To help understand an ever-changing epidemic, Bloomberg School researchers designed the Behavioral Surveillance Research Study, or BESURE, a multi-year, 25-city study that probes HIV risk behaviors among three populations: injection drug users, homosexual men, and heterosexual men and women living in areas of high-HIV prevalence. The aim is to get the best data possible on how the disease spreads in the community so that prevention programs can be targeted for maximum effectiveness. “We are scientists, not policymakers,” says Baltimore BESURE’s principal investigator, Frangiscos Sifakis, PhD ’02, MPH, “but it would be disingenuous to say that we don’t hope that getting a firm grasp on what behaviors put people at risk will eventually drive public policy.”