SATH-CAP stands for the Sexual Acquisition and Transmission of HIV Cooperative Agreement Program. The overall goal of SATH-CAP is to better understand how patterns of sexual and drug use behaviors along with other social and environmental factors, such as other sexually transmitted diseases, places where people gather for sex and drug activities, and types of partnerships, influence the spread of HIV/AIDS from people currently at high risk for HIV/AIDS, like drug users and men who have sex with men (MSM), to those at a lower risk.

Specifically, the study seeks to answer these primary questions:

  • To what extent do HIV infections among drug-using populations spread to uninfected drug users and non-drug users through drug-related and/or sexual transmission behaviors?
  • What individual (behavioral, biological), network, and structural characteristics influence the speed, extent and path of the spread?

The SATH-CAP includes five research centers, a scientific and logistical coordinating center at RAND, and the funder, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). The research centers are:

  • Research Triangle Institute (RTI)
  • University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
  • University of Illinois, Chicago (UIC)
  • Yale University
  • The Biomedical Center (BMC), St. Petersburg, Russia, Andrei Kozlov