The 9th SA AIDS Conference will take place 11-14 June 2019 at the International Convention Centre (ICC) in Durban, South Africa. The theme for this year’s conference is Unprecedented Innovations and Technologies: HIV and change and will focus on unprecedented scientific, social and digital innovations/technologies which could expand possibilities and opportunities towards controlling the HIV & AIDS epidemic. This conference is the second largest HIV conference in the world, attended by over 3,000 people, 25 percent of which are from countries other than South Africa. Delegates include scientists, medical practitioners and representatives from the public sector, NGO and faith-based sectors and the corporate sector.

The first goal of the National HIV/AIDS Strategy (NHAS) is to “reduce new infections.” In order to monitor progress toward this goal, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Office of National AIDS Policy will be looking at three chosen “indicators” leading up to 2020:

• Increase the percentage of people living with HIV who know their serostatus to at least 90 percent.
• Reduce the number of new diagnoses by at least 25 percent.
• Reduce the percentage of young gay and bisexual men who have engaged in HIV-risk behaviors by at least 10 percent.

Some national HIV prevention advocates question if these are the right national indicators to monitor progress on reducing new infections. In 2015, the CDC and Office of National AIDS Policy changed the way in which we monitor progress toward this goal by switching from incidence estimates to using new diagnoses. Are diagnoses really measuring the number of people being infected each year? Should changing sexual behavior still be a primary indicator in NHAS? Where is PrEP? What about more structural indicators?

Join Treatment Action Group and HIV PJA for an online discussion about other possibilities for monitoring progress and what community advocates and other key stakeholders need to know about how we measure success in our national HIV prevention efforts.

Register here.

Panelists include:

• Keri N Althoff, Associate Professor, Department of Epidemiology, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
• Denis Nash, PhD, MPH, City University of New York (CUNY); Executive Director, CUNY Institute for Implementation Science in Population Health (ISPH); Professor of Epidemiology, CUNY School of Public Health
• Stefan Baral, Associate Professor, Department of Epidemiology, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

There has been lots of discussion about the different PrEP guidelines with respect to how long it takes women to get protection with oral PrEP. This webinar tried to help us all understand the data that do exist. The call featured pharmacologists who’ve generated much of the data to briefly present their data and interpretations. This was followed by a Q&A period.

Download the audio and slides below. Or watch the webinar on YouTube.

On March 20, IPM, AVAC, Dalberg Design Impact Group and the USAID Center for Accelerating Innovation and Impact held a side event during the 61st session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women.

The conversation brought together stakeholders working to advance women’s empowerment by building bridges between global health and economic empowerment initiatives. Participants discussed:

• Human-centered design techniques being devised to support the development and introduction of new, female-initiated HIV prevention technologies, such as the dapivirine ring, to help empower young women and girls to make positive health decisions

• Insights into the lives and journeys of adolescent girls and young women who are potential users of these new HIV prevention technologies

• How human-centered research can merge public health and economic imperatives to design products that fit into women’s lives holistically, and that generate new and effective approaches to engage young women equitably, sustainably and at scale

When: Monday, March 20, 2017, 2:30-4pm
Where: Church Center of the United Nations

In this call, panelists discussed what the WHO grading system for family planning methods is, what impact a change in classification for DMPA and NET-EN has for women, programs and research, and what needs to happen next.

Listen to a recording of the call (mp3, YouTube).

AVAC has developed a plain language fact sheet on this topic and a full range of resources can be found here. This includes, “Now more than ever,” a statement from members of the Civil Society Advocacy Working Group on HC-HIV. This statement puts the developments with DMPA in the broader context of women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights which are needed—now more than ever. There is even more urgency in this work in light of today’s reinstatement of the Global Gag Rule prohibiting abortion-related services or advocacy by foreign recipients of US family planning dollars. The updated resource page also includes statement from the ECHO trial (an ongoing study of how different contraceptive methods impact women’s risk of HIV).

We continued this conversation with Dr. James Kiarie, coordinator of the Human Reproduction Team at the World Health Organization. To listen, visit here.

In this webinar, we were joined by Dr. James Kiarie, coordinator of the Human Reproduction Team at the World Health Organization. Dr. Kiarie presented new guidance from WHO on hormonal contraceptive eligibility for women at high risk of HIV. He also fielded questions from webinar participants.

Recording

YouTube / Slides / Audio

This webinar builds on a March 10 webinar on this topic, which featured advocates and clinicians putting the guidance in context. A recording of that conversation is available here.