25 JANUARY 2019 VOLUME 20 ISSUE 3

In 1991, I remember where I was walking when I learned that Magic Johnson was HIV positive. I shuffled along in a daze, distraught at the thought of such a young and magnificent man facing imminent death. Back then, you see, an HIV diagnosis was practically a death sentence. Of course, Magic Johnson is still alive. But he was one of the minority of people in 1991 who were able to get the virus under control with the medications of that time. For the vast majority of people, the medications weren’t effective at suppressing the virus. Their days were numbered.

Around 25000 people are taking PrEP in Kenya, making it Africa’s largest PrEP programme, ahead of South Africa (9000 people), Uganda (4000) and Zimbabwe (4000). The rollout was recently described by officials from Kenya’s Ministry of Health in the journal Sexual Health and also at October's HIV Research for Prevention conference.

For almost four decades, researchers have worked tirelessly to find a cure for the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which causes AIDS. There’s still more work to do, but a recent commentary published in JAMA by Anthony Fauci, director of NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and his colleagues serves as a reminder of just how far we’ve come. Today, thanks to scientific advances, especially the development of effective antiretroviral therapy (ART), most people living with HIV can live full and productive lives.

State Senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) and Assemblyman Todd Gloria (D-San Diego) on Thursday announced new legislation to reduce barriers to accessing HIV preventative medications such as PrEP.

To stem the tides of HIV/AIDS prevalence in Nigeria, a non-governmental organisation, AVAC, in collaboration with the Centre for The Right to Health (CRH), has taken up the gauntlet to lead advocacy against the disease which, according to medical research, is having upper hand on the most productive section of the country’s population—the youth.

Young black gay and bisexual men are more likely to be exposed to HIV than their white or Hispanic peers even though they have fewer sex partners overall and have less condomless anal sex, a study from Chicago has found.

The message is simple but quite radical: It’s possible for people living with HIV to have a healthy and fulfilling sex life. That’s the core of a campaign tackling HIV stigma in Vietnam—a collaboration between the Centers for Disease Control, the Partnership for Health Advancement in Vietnam (HAIVN), and the creative agency The Lab Saigon.

The Trump administration has been “notably absent from leadership on HIV/AIDS,” for most of its two years in power, according to a policy brief from the Fenway Institute, a center for research, education and policy development regarding LGBT and HIV-related issues.

Teen pregnancies are soaring and HIV care has stalled in rural communities hit by ‘global gag’ funding cuts.

MVC-containing HIV PrEP regimens did not increase GALT CD4+ T-cell activation or the CD4+/CCR5+ phenotype. No virologic suppression was seen with MVC-alone at Week 48 compared with combination regimens, suggesting MVC monotherapy might be less effective than combination antiretroviral PrEP regimens.

NHS England announced in January that it will fund an increase in the number of participants in the Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) Impact Trial from 13 000 to 26 000. Although approved in principle, the trial oversight board said on January 23 that it needs to further engage with local authorities and trial sites before an exact timescale for the increase is fixed. Scheduled to end in 2020, the 3-year trial has been oversubscribed by men who have sex with men (MSM), with capacity reached in many clinics and potential participants turned away.

In areas of high HIV prevalence and treatment coverage, the cost of untargeted home-based testing may be inflated by the efforts required to assess the testing eligibility of clients who are HIV-positive and on ART. Home-based and mobile testing delivered though an intensive community-based campaign allowed the identification of HIV positive persons, who may not access health facilities, at a cost comparable to other studies.

The most effective demand creation strategies for PrEP may be those that address the everyday life priorities of potential users in addition to HIV prevention.

Failing to account for constraints on allocative and technical efficiency can result in the overestimation of the health gains possible, and for technical inefficiencies the allocation of an inefficient strategy.