A Cycle of Transmission in South Africa

Men and women in specific age groups have distinct health and prevention needs. HIV transmission conforms to specific patterns, depending on age and gender. Effective prevention and Treatment U=U must reflect the needs of each profile. Excerpted from AVAC Report 2016: Big Data, Real People.

After the HIV Test: Targets and Progress in Making and Measuring Linkages

If a person tests HIV-negative, the next steps are poorly understood. This infographic from AVAC Report 2016: Big Data, Real People, shows a cascade of interventions needed for prevention, as well as the existing structure in place to guide an HIV positive individual from testing to Treatment U=U.

Biomedical Prevention in 2016 – At a Glance

A snapshot of prevention strategies underway or under development from 2015-2020. Excerpted from AVAC Report 2016: Big Data, Real People.

Key Barriers to Women’s Access to HIV Treatment: Making ‘Fact-Track’ a Reality

It is essential to understand the barriers to and facilitators of women’s access to ART, so that individual choices about when and whether to start, and continue with, treatment translate into positive mental and physical health outcomes for the woman, as well as benefiting public health.

In this review, socio-structural factors were explored at macro-, meso- and micro-levels in order to better understand the experiences women living with HIV have of treatment availability and their decision-making around uptake, and to assess how treatment programmes affect their lives. Removing barriers and changing policies and programmes to align with best practices will contribute substantially to efforts for the achievement of global goals such as the ‘90-90-90’ UNAIDS ‘Fast-Track’ targets.

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Press Release

Community Consensus Statement on Access to HIV Treatment and its Use for Prevention

Contacts

The fundamentals of HIV treatment provision: eight global HIV advocacy groups release consensus statement at the International AIDS Conference

Durban, South Africa—The HIV epidemic could become a thing of the past, as long as everyone involved in providing HIV drugs as treatment and as prevention sticks to a few basic principles respecting the rights of people with or at high risk of HIV, eight global HIV treatment advocacy organisations announced today on the eve of the 2016 International AIDS Conference.

AVAC, the European AIDS Treatment Group (EATG), the Global Forum on MSM & HIV (MSMGF), the Global Network of People living with HIV (GNP+), HIV i-Base, the International HIV/AIDS Alliance, the International Treatment Preparedness Coalition (ITPC) and NAM/aidsmap have released the Community Consensus Statement on Access to HIV Treatment and its Use for Prevention as a sign-on statement at www.hivt4p.org for endorsement by as many people working with and affected by HIV as possible.

Simon Collins, advocate at HIV i-Base says, “This clear community demand for the right for universal access to ART is an essential step to achieving our common goal to end AIDS.”

Sixteen years ago, the International AIDS Conference was also held in Durban. That ground-breaking conference woke the world to the fact that providing HIV treatment to people in under-resourced countries was not only lifesaving and a matter of global justice, it was, even more importantly, feasible.

Since then, in what is one of the most remarkable medical initiatives of all time, HIV treatment has expanded to the point where 2016 will be the year that more than half of the people in the world who need HIV treatment get it.

But that still leaves nearly half the world in danger of dying from AIDS, and that need is concentrated among certain regions such as the Middle East and eastern Europe and among certain groups such as people who inject drugs.

In addition, although people on treatment are less infectious, the number of HIV cases continues to rise among some groups, most notably men who have sex with men.

Why? Partly it is due to the number of people still in need of treatment; equally, however, it is because those unreached by treatment or appropriate prevention belong to already-stigmatised groups likely to be stigmatised further if it is known they have HIV.

“While in practice, getting HIV treatment to those who need it may involve considerable expense, logistical challenges and a re-modelling in healthcare services,” says NAM/aidsmap’s Gus Cairns, who helped write the statement, “in principle, it’s not complicated”.

“At heart, the statement says two things: Don’t withhold HIV treatment; equally, don’t enforce it. People have the right to treatment, but also the right to the information and freedom they need to take it as a choice.”

The statement is written as 40 short sentences in deliberately simplified English, spelling out basic principles to be observed in extending HIV testing, treatment and drug-based prevention to all.

The statement emphasises that treatment should be free and offered to everyone with HIV without coercion. Information about treatment and support to take it should be available for everyone. Income, gender, sexuality, age, drug use or social status should not prevent people from getting antiretroviral treatment (ART).

The statement also covers the use of antiretroviral drugs by people who are HIV-negative to prevent HIV infection, known as pre-exposure prophylaxis or PrEP. The option to use PrEP should be available for all people who need it and information about PrEP should be available to all people at risk of HIV infection. PrEP should be offered now to those at high risk of HIV infection, the statement recommends.

“We wanted to hold people’s feet to the fire in the world of HIV,” Cairns continues, “and say essentially, ‘If you can’t agree to this, why not?’ We’d like to see it adopted by the organisations that write treatment guidelines and run programmes as a sort of DNA for what they are doing, the basic principles underlying and directing their actions.”

The following organisations have been involved in writing this statement:

Background

Two years ago, NAM and EATG, with the support of a number of other organisations, released the Community consensus statement on the use of antiretroviral therapy in preventing transmission. This went through a year’s worth of development and was released as a sign-on statement. This new statement is a simpler, more fundamental and more widely co-authored development of that.

Why a new statement?

The science surrounding the use of antiretrovirals to prevent HIV, as well as policy and activism, have moved rapidly over the last two years. In particular, there is now broad consensus for the first time that antiretroviral therapy is both of general medical benefit to people with HIV and, if provided globally, could drastically reduce the HIV infection rate worldwide. In addition, there is increasing awareness of and debate about the use of antiretroviral drugs as PrEP, to prevent infection in HIV-negative people at the highest risk of HIV infection.

New! AVAC Report 2016 Big Data, Real People: The annual state of prevention advocacy

If you’re packing for Durban, we hope you’ll pause right now and add to your bag AVAC’s annual state of the field, Big Data Real People. The full PDF, Executive Summary and graphics are available here.

As always, AVAC Report is our annual advocacy analysis, with an agenda that spans the next 12 months—and beyond. We’ve designed it be a clear, succinct, actionable statement of the strengths and weakness of HIV prevention data today—and we hope you’ll join us in amplifying these messages at next week’s gathering.

Even if you’re not heading to Durban, we hope that this year’s Report will top your packing list for the journey through the next 12 months of advocacy and action.

In the Report, we argue that the state of HIV prevention data collection in 2016 is poor. One part of the solution lies in the adoption of “HIV Prevention Data Dashboards”. This tracking tool could bring the same specificity and accountability to non-ART prevention services that the “treatment cascade” of diagnosis, initiation, retention and virologic suppression does for antiretrovirals for people living with HIV.

The world cannot even pretend that ending AIDS is possible without action on non-ART prevention. We need to roll out what we have, continue R&D on what we still need, as well as scale up ART for all people living with HIV. That’s what the new UNAIDS Prevention Gap report says. That’s what AVAC has said for years. That’s what we hope you’ll say in Durban and over the coming year.

Here’s the Report, a roadmap for the coming year. Please read it, join us on the journey, let us know what you think!

Press Release

Data gaps hinder global efforts to reduce HIV infections, AVAC report warns; improved data collection and reporting needed to meet looming global AIDS targets

Contacts

Mitchell Warren, [email protected], +1-914-661-1536
Kay Marshall, [email protected], +1-347-249-6375

In a report issued today, AVAC warned that major gaps in global HIV/AIDS data stand in the way of delivering HIV prevention advances to millions of people who need them most. The report identifies several critical weaknesses of today’s HIV prevention data collection and monitoring systems and offers a concrete roadmap for closing these gaps. The report, Big Data, Real People, was issued ahead of next week’s International AIDS Conference in Durban, South Africa (July 18-22), where advocates will demand action to speed HIV prevention research and delivery.

“In an era in which big data are expected to improve essentially every part of our lives, there’s no excuse for HIV prevention data systems to be so uneven, incomplete and inefficient,” said Mitchell Warren, AVAC’s executive director. “To have any chance of ending the epidemic by 2030, we need to be collecting and accounting for every bit of useful information from every person living with or at risk for HIV.”

The need for improved HIV prevention data systems is particularly pressing given the UNAIDS “fast-track” goal to reduce new annual diagnoses to no more than 500,000 by 2020. Earlier this month, UNAIDS reported that the number of new HIV infections has remained near 2 million per year for the past decade.

Report identifies specific HIV data gaps, recommends solutions

AVAC’s report focuses on four critical data gaps that must be addressed to effectively prioritize, target and measure the impact of efforts to develop and deliver HIV prevention advances.

Specifically, today’s HIV prevention data are:

  • Not sufficiently broken down by age, gender, income status, key population status and other vital categories
  • Missing or incomplete for key populations most in need of prevention, including adolescent girls and young women, men who have sex with men, transgender women, and others
  • Not tied to useful HIV prevention metrics and indicators, so that it is impossible to know whether prevention programs are actually averting infections and improving health
  • Not effectively informing the HIV prevention research agenda

To overcome these weaknesses, the report outlines three critical strategies that should be pursued most urgently:

1. Standardize and systemize data collection and reporting for HIV prevention

Understand, measure and report on the risk level of people testing HIV-negative; create and measure linkages to evidence-based prevention for people at substantial risk; and use a standardized “Prevention Data Dashboard” to continually evaluate progress. Such dashboards would consolidate and arrange available data to illuminate critical prevention gaps and help the global community, governments and funders better conceptualize their HIV prevention programming and evaluation. AVAC’s report provides a model dashboard for decision-makers to adopt.

2. Improve use of data for adolescent girls and young women

Ensure that a growing volume of available data can be applied in a meaningful way. As a first step, funders, implementers and governments need to do a better job of defining and segmenting this population; map who is investing in what and where; put adolescent girls and young women in control of core aspects of the data-collection enterprise; and adopt gender-specific indicators tailored to girls and women.

3. Put research on the “fast-track” and countries at the center

Fit biomedical HIV prevention research into comprehensive prevention plans tied to national targets for incidence reduction. Countries and research institutions must invest time and resources in stakeholder engagement; ensure that research priorities are informed by epidemiological and other quality HIV data; and develop national research plans for meeting the prevention needs of specific, affected populations.

The new report and related resources, including downloadable graphics, are available now at www.avac.org/report2016.

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About AVAC: Founded in 1995, AVAC is a non-profit organization that uses education, policy analysis, advocacy and a network of global collaborations to accelerate the ethical development and global delivery of AIDS vaccines, male circumcision, microbicides, PrEP and other emerging HIV prevention options as part of a comprehensive response to the pandemic.

MPT Products in the Pipeline: Selected highlights

This table shows which MPTs are further along in testing for both sustained-release and on-demand products. Women will have different needs and preferences throughout their lives. An array of different types of products is key to meeting the varying needs of different women. Excerpted from the MPTs factsheet.

“We Neglect Primary HIV Prevention at Our Peril”

Inspired by a steady decline in new HIV infections and AIDS-related deaths, the sustainable development goals call for ending the AIDS epidemic as a public health threat by 2030. However, the world is not on track to end the epidemic. – “We neglect primary HIV prevention at our peril”, Lancet HIV

The July issue of The Lancet HIV, launched online earlier this week, focuses on the need to scale up prevention to reduce new infections—reiterating that achieving the UNAIDS’ 90-90-90 treatment targets is not possible otherwise.

As the editors note in the introduction to the issue, “We can do much with existing interventions, but as the papers in this issue show evolution of programmes and technology will be needed to have the greatest effect.”

The issue is made up of a series of papers that attempt to show what needs to happen in prevention to reduce incidence and reach global and national targets. The papers cover a range of topics, including:

  • How we might create, use and understand a “prevention cascade” to assess programming;
  • What modeling shows we might be able to achieve if available interventions are appropriately scaled;
  • A framework for how to achieve UNAIDS’ ambitious targets and the actions need to get there; and more.

For those attending AIDS 2016, please save the date for a special session that will focus on this issue and its call to action: What Will it Take to Reach the Fast Track Prevention Targets: What, Who and How, on Monday, July 18, 14:45–16:45, Session Room 5.

In addition, as many in the field prepare to head to Durban next month, we are pleased to see that the Second Durban Declaration, released today by the International AIDS Society for endorsement through the end of the AIDS 2016 conference, devoted significant ink to prevention, both the implementation of what’s currently available, the need for research into new options and the fundamental structural barriers that must be addressed.

What Should the Next US President Do? Advice for Hillary and Donald.

On behalf of IFARA, thebodypro.com recently posted two videos. In the first, Jim Pickett, director of Prevention Advocacy and Gay Men’s Health at the AIDS Foundation of Chicago, spoke with Robert Grant, MD, MPH, Mike Cohen, MD, Ian McGowan, MD, PhD, FRCP, and Mitchell Warren about HIV prevention research presented at this year’s Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI).

New prevention tools, such as a safe and effective vaginal ring and the prospect of long-acting injectable agents are exciting news, panelists agreed. However, these tools are only as good as their implementation — as is the case with already approved methods, such as oral pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). This includes finding and effectively treating people living with HIV, because those with an undetectable viral load do not transmit the virus.

Panelists would advise the next US President to invest in long-term research, including the search for a vaccine, cure, fund open-label studies of the vaginal ring, and provide treatment and prevention services to as many people as possible — especially women and men of color.

Watch the video on thebodypro.com.

In the second video, AVAC Policy Director Kevin Fisher spoke with Steven Wakefield and Ntando Yola about the development of a vaccine for HIV.

Wakefield called antibody-mediated prevention “the next holy grail.” Trials of broadly neutralizing antibodies that are infused every two months will start enrollment across the globe by mid-year, he said. However, a potential vaccine is just one component in a set of HIV prevention methods. Yola described HIV prevention as “a track field where products are racing each other.” Communities pin their hopes on each new prevention modality, but the focus needs to be moved from specific methods to overall prevention science, he believes. To that end, the science behind vaccine research needs to be explained in a way that people in the community can understand.

This video is also available at thebodypro.com.