How to Improve Living With HIV?

Moving effective treatment and prevention tools fast enough to the people who need them most is important if countries are serious about ending AIDS by 2030. Current prevention options (such as, oral daily PrEP, once-a-month vaginal dapivirine ring for women, 2-monthly long-acting injectable) along with improved treatment modalities are enhancing the HIV/AIDS arena. Scientific interventions alone will not help unless they are made accessible to those living with HIV or are at risk of it.

Even today 25% of people living with HIV are not on treatment and last year (2020), 690,000 people died from AIDS related illnesses and 1.5 million were newly infected with HIV.

From research to implementation is a long and arduous journey with too many stumbling blocks. Many discussions at the recently concluded 11th International IAS Conference on HIV Science (IAS 2021) centred around the challenges, and solutions thereof, to speed up the processes to get any new product into people’s hands.

First and foremost is getting the product approved by global regulatory bodies like the WHO, US FDA and EMA. Next comes individual countries’ willingness to endorse the product (and different countries may have different regulatory processes).

Countries take quite some time to understand the guidance given by WHO and others, and then disseminate that information to the service providers. This process usually could take about a year. So national templates must be developed early on for countries to adapt quickly.

Clear, accurate, and reliable information, needs to get to all people living with HIV to make informed decisions. So, providing a complete knowledge and information to the communities about any new product is important.

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People should be able to access HIV prevention services, family planning services, and other services for sexually transmitted infections (STIs), all at one place - preferably a community-based place. It would help to involve communities and utilize community cadres who can be trained to deliver some of the services.

High cost of the product is another deterrent for its uptake. Unless they are subsidised or their generic equivalents are made available, product uptake is not increased.

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Scientific evidence proves that criminalization is a direct threat to the HIV response. Countries with progressive laws and human rights protection in place are doing much better in tackling the HIV epidemic, while countries that criminalize same sex relationship, sex work and drug use, have more people with undiagnosed HIV and lower rates of viral suppression.

All communities should benefit from the results of science, else public health value of these scientific advancements will be very limited.



Source-Medindia