"You tell him that 'baby, I am protecting myself'": Women's agency and constraint around willingness to use pre-exposure prophylaxis in the Masibambane Study.

Objectives: To explore women's willingness to consider using pre-exposure prophylaxis for HIV prevention in the context of gendered relationship dynamics, in Durban, South Africa.

Methods: As formative research prior to development of a gender-informed intervention to introduce pre-exposure prophylaxis to young, urban, educated women, we conducted six focus-group discussions and eight in-depth interviews with 46 women ages 18-25 years, who were not current pre-exposure prophylaxis users. Women were recruited from clinic and community settings using a criterion-based snowball sampling technique.

Medical male circumcision and HIV risk: perceptions of women in a higher learning institution in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.

Background: Medical male circumcision (MMC) reduces the risk of HIV acquisition for men in heterosexual encounters by 50-60%. However, there is no evidence that a circumcised man with HIV poses any less risk of infecting his female partner than an uncircumcised man. There may be an additional risk of HIV transmission to female partners during the 6-week healing period and if condoms are used less often after circumcision.