A response to IRIN/PlusNews list of six potholes in the road to significantly increasing HIV treatment coverage in Africa.
1. Cost:
The Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) has estimated that US$ 28 billion to US$ 50 billion would be needed globally every year from 2010 to 2015 in order to progressively reach universal access targets for HIV/AIDS by 2015. One-third of this will contribute towards the cost of the drugs.
The figure may sound “staggering” but it needs to be put in perspective with a few other figures such as:

The cost of …

Can we, and should we, pay people to change their behaviour to stop the spread of the HIV virus which causes AIDS? When it comes to HIV prevention, there is nowadays no limit to the “we need more options” motto and that’s what two World Bank studies conducted in Malawi and Tanzania showed.
In an experiment conducted in Malawi, girls aged 13 to 22 and their parents received as much as $15 each month if the girls attended school regularly, HIV Prevalence was 60% lower among girls receiving cash payments.Though this …

Back in January, I wrote a comment following Rick Rowden’s public launch at SOAS of his book “The Deadly Ideas of Neoliberalism: How the IMF has Undermined Public Health and the Fight Against AIDS”.  Today I open this blog to Rick who emailled me with the following response. I am still reading through Rick’s book and hope to come back to this issue very soon.
Dear peripheries:
Thanks you for covering the launch of my book at SOAS in London in January. I appreciate your attempt to review my book before reading …

HAART for HIV Prevention, an Overview
(reproduced with permission)

Despite the interesting results of an HIV vaccine trial in Thailand (RV144), HIV prevention is still limited to a small number of options many of which are not bullet-proof. Biomedical interventions based on vaccines and microbicides are still a long shot away. Conversely, treatment is working well in bringing HIV-infected people back to a normal life and potentially reducing the risk of HIV transmission by reducing their viral load. The use of antiretroviral drugs as a means …

OPINION. One objection against the use of ARV treatment for HIV prevention is that it puts people on treatment whilst they may clinically not need it. My first reaction to that is to ask when is it clinically relevant to treat an HIV infected person? So far the various guidelines produced are clear and based on the CD4 count. But the guidelines have changed during the years and the goalpost has been moved from below 200 to below 350 and soon to below 500 and is reaching the mean Cd4 …