Sub-Saharan Africa

News from aidsmap

• Self-testing and home treatment initiation triples uptake of HIV treatment in Malawi

  Retention and linkage to care
  Keith Alcorn | 21 March 2013

  Offering people the opportunity to self-test at home and then start antiretroviral therapy after counselling at home, together with home delivery of antiretroviral drugs, increased the number of people linked to care after ...

• Malawi achieves seven-fold increase in ART for pregnant and breastfeeding women

  Prevention of mother-to-child transmission
  Carole Leach-Lemens | 12 March 2013

  Eighteen months after implementation of 'Option B+' in Malawi – ART for life for all HIV-infected, pregnant or breastfeeding women regardless of CD4 count or disease stage – the number of HIV-infected ...

• Routine viral load monitoring almost halves risk of virologic failure in 18-month Kenyan study

  Health monitoring in resource-limited settings
  Lesley Odendal | 12 March 2013

  Six-monthly viral load testing of patients taking antiretroviral therapy (ART) at primary health clinics in rural Kenya reduced the risk of virologic failure at 18 months of follow-up by 46%, according to ...

• Contraceptive injections and HIV infection risk – a public health conundrum

  Contraception
  Roger Pebody | 10 March 2013

  The concerns about a possible increase in risk of HIV acquisition with some hormonal contraceptive methods need to be understood in the context of the substantial uncertainties in the body ...

• Slow progress in expansion of voluntary circumcision coverage

  Circumcision
  Gus Cairns | 07 March 2013

  Progress towards greater coverage of voluntary male circumcision (MC) in Africa remains slow, and is due as much to men’s fear of the operation as it is to resource constraints, despite low ...

• Continuing cotrimoxazole in children on ART reduces the risk of hospitalisation

  Opportunistic infections
  Carole Leach-Lemens | 06 March 2013

  Children on ART for more than two years who continued taking daily cotrimoxazole had significantly fewer hospitalisations for malaria as well as for non-malarial infections (notably pneumonia, sepsis and meningitis), compared to children ...

• HIV treatment for children is safe and highly effective without laboratory monitoring in large African trial

  Health monitoring in resource-limited settings
  Keith Alcorn | 05 March 2013

  Children did just as well on antiretroviral therapy without routine laboratory monitoring of CD4 cell counts or drug side-effects as those who received regular monitoring during four years of follow-up, researchers from Uganda ...

• VOICE trial's disappointing result poses big questions for PrEP

  PrEP
  Gus Cairns | 04 March 2013

  The failure of one of the largest trials yet conducted of HIV drug-based prevention methods poses questions for how to turn vaginal microbicides and oral pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) into methods people can actually ...