HIV and the Long Tail of Child Sexual Abuse: Duke University researchers in collaboration with researchers from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Appalachian State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found that one in four HIV patients in the study had been sexually abused as a child. More than half of the patients in the study had experienced sexual or physical abuse in their lifetimes. These traumatic experiences were linked in the study to worse health outcomes among these patients.