About This Course

In this 2026 update STI course we focus on three major topics: Novelties of prevention including detailed overview of doxycycline prophylaxis, novelties of diagnosis and novelties of treatment. This course is based on news presented at the 2025 STI&HIV conference in Montreal, a number of important recent publications and new WHO guiding.

We discuss how we can optimize syndromic management of STIs by improving diagnostic testing and the diagnostic gaps we are still facing for point-of-care tests. Several country experiences with point-of-care tests are presented.

Important treatment news is summarized as well as the topic of asymptomatic chlamydia infections. We also provide an overview of female genital schistosomiasis, affecting more than 20 million women in Africa leading to serious complications and often being misdiagnosed. In the last part of our course we give a detailed overview of current status of vaccine development for STIs , The Global STI Vaccine Roadmap.

This 3 weeks course is a follow-up course on our previous 2 STI courses (part 1 and part 2) which you should have followed before you start with this course. The course is highly recommended to be followed by all AHF healthcare workers involved in HIV and STI care and is awarded with 4 CME credit hours. It was prepared by Dr. Clemens Richter, CME consultant AHF in cooperation with and reviewed by Dr. Adele Schwartz Benzaken, Senior Global Medical Director and Dr. Fernanda Fonseca, Associate Global Medical Director.