By Martha Henry When “Treatment as Prevention” was named Science magazine’s Breakthrough of the Year in 2011, there was optimism that we were closing in on AIDS. Results published from the HPTN 052 trial that year showed that in discordant couples, giving antiretroviral treatment (ART) to people with HIV not only was good for their own health, but also lowered the levels of HIV in their blood to undetectable levels, making the…
Dr. Virginia “Ginny” Bond is a Social Anthropologist and Associate Professor at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. Based in Zambia, she heads the social science unit at Zambart. She is the lead social scientist for PopART (Population Effects of Antiretroviral Therapy to Reduce HIV Transmission) a large community-randomized trial being carried out in 21 communities in South Africa and Zambia. The trial is designed to evaluate the impact of…
By Elliot Eton (Eton spent a gap year working with HAI in Boston and Botswana. He’s now a freshman at Harvard. This article originally appeared in the Fall 2015 issue of Harvard Science Review.) The target is 2030. The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) has ambitiously set 2030 as the year by which we should achieve the end of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, which has claimed the lives of 39…
Continue reading “Updates on Efforts to Combat the HIV/AIDS Pandemic”
Can We Treat Our Way Out of the AIDS Epidemic? With no cure or vaccine in sight, HIV/AIDS remains a devastating epidemic, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa where nearly 70% of new HIV infections occur. To curb HIV/AIDS, researchers have proposed a strategy to use drug treatment to decrease new transmissions so much that the epidemic eventually dies out. The concept requires changes in standards of when anti-retroviral therapy begins and…
How do your define ‘household’ in a culture where extended families split time between town, the farm, and a cattle post? Who else has had trouble enrolling men? What happens if several large, expensive clinical trials deliver completely different results several years from now? These were some of the important questions asked at the Treatment as Prevention in Africa (TasP Africa) workshop held this May in Gaborone, Botswana.
April 30 – May 3, 2014 • Gaborone, Botswana TasP Africa Participant List TasP Africa Program, including presentations of talks Worldwide, 35 million people are living with HIV. About 25 million of those people live in sub-Saharan Africa. About 1.6 million people were newly infected with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa last year.
“We strongly believe that with this project we have the chance to make history in the fight against AIDS,” said Michelle Gavin, U.S. Ambassador to Botswana, at the November 8th press conference in Gaborone announcing the launch of the Botswana Combination Prevention Project.
96% reduction in HIV transmission Researchers involved in a large multinational study recently announced that men and women with HIV who take antiretroviral drugs have a 96% lower risk of transmitting the virus to their sexual partners. The study results, just published in The New England Journal of Medicine, were hailed by AIDS experts as a game-changer.
