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 …

As a volunteer for a gay men’s organisation I am sometimes involved in HIV prevention work in gay venues in central London. The organisation I work for develops posters, adverts and booklets to promote HIV prevention messages targeting a specific audience.
Recently, I was helping pre-testing our latest booklet to which I had also contributed. Therefore I knew what the booklet was about, which is usually not the case since editorial and testing teams are different. Over a period of two hours I interviewed ten people who agreed, some after a …

In February 2007, a Welsh man was diagnosed with HIV at the Cardiff Royal Infirmary in Wales. So far, he was one amongst the 2500+ new HIV diagnoses in the UK that year. But he became the subject of scientific investigation when he reported 62 sexual encounters in the previous 6 months.
Of his first 9 sexual partners contacted by a team of researchers from the Cardiff Royal Infirmary interested in the transmission of HIV through sexual network, 5 turned out to be HIV positive. This did not mean that he …

Treatment as a means to prevent HIV infection has hit the media following a declaration by Brian Williams, professor of epidemiology at the South African Centre for Epidemiological Modelling and Analysis in Stellenbosch, at the AAAS in San Diego.
Whilst the HIV epidemic has shown some signs of stabilisation in the recent years, more than 7,000 people are still infected every day with the virus that causes AIDS.
Despite interesting results of a vaccine trial in Thailand, prevention is still limited to a small number of options many of which are not …