AVAC in the News

In a bid to include ethical considerations in the HIV prevention trial process UNAIDS and the World Health Organisation recently launched a new guidance document for ethical consideration for HIV prevention trials. The guidance among other things, calls for the inclusion of communities that live in settings where trials are taking place as equal partners.

This year's HIV Research for Prevention (HIVR4P) virtual conference featured a large number of sessions examining PrEP usage and discontinuation rates among a variety of users, especially in Africa. Many of the presentations looked at factors that worked as incentives to keep taking PrEP. There is interest in this because, despite higher initiation rates in a larger number of countries than ever before, the retention rates (also called persistence rates) of people in PrEP programmes in the region remain very low.

Global funding for COVID-19 vaccine development has exceeded 10 times in less than a year the amount allocated for HIV and TB research and development in 11 years.

Nearly 1 million people are now taking pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), medicine that can slash the risk of HIV infections. While early use of the drug was mostly limited to Western nations, the number of users in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has now drastically increased, accounting for more than half of the world’s PrEP users.