Avac Event

Whose Choice is it Anyway?

On Monday, October 1st, IRMA and AVAC led a lively discussion on the BRAND NEW IRMA report titled: Whose Choice is it Anyway? Analysis of Comments to and Responses from NIH’s 2017 “Refining the Research Enterprise” Request for Input on Research Priorities. (How’s that for the longest report title in the world?)

Click here to read the new report Whose Choice is it Anyway?

As everyone in the field is aware, the NIH conducted an input process last year that concluded with a release of new HIV prevention research priorities that favor long acting, systemic formulations (like vaccines, implants and injectables) and negate the need for short acting, user-controlled, non-systemic approaches (like vaginal and rectal microbicides).

IRMA was curious about the input that was collected—did most scientists, advocates, and other stakeholders indeed prioritize long acting, systemic formulations, showing little to no interest in other approaches like microbicides?

We asked NIH to see the input that came in, and what their responses were – and they declined to provide that information. So IRMA’s home organization, AIDS Foundation of Chicago, filed a Freedom of Information Act request. And we received over 300 pages of input to NIH, as well as responses to the input from NIH leadership.

IRMA’s Marc-André LeBlanc and Jim Pickett shared the key findings from the analysis of those 300+ pages as presented in the report. They will outlined next steps we can take collectively to help claim and ensure space in the research agenda for HIV prevention options that advocates and researchers want —options that can be used on demand, when, where and how individuals desire.

Special guests from the advocacy community, Irene Hware, Sinazo Peter and Ntando Yola, were invited to make remarks.

Recording: YouTube / Audio / Slides

Avac Event

Breaking the Cycle of Transmission: Understanding effective HIV prevention among adolescent girls and young women in South Africa

On Tuesday, 27 November 2018, 8-10am EST (3-5pm SAST) there was a webinar that provided an update on an exciting human-centred design project focused on better understanding and designing HIV prevention programs for adolescent girls and young women in South Africa.

Through the HIV Prevention Market Manager Project funded by the by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, AVAC is working with two innovative design groups – Final Mile and Upstream – to apply behavioural economics and human-centred design to better reach young women in South Africa with effective HIV prevention. The HIV Prevention Market Manager Project is also mapping completed, ongoing and planned AGYW work and compiling end user resources.

During the webinar, we presented and discussed the initial qualitative research findings from the project, looking at individual barriers and drivers as well as social and structural factors that influence the decisions and behaviours of young women along their sexual and reproductive health journey. The webinar explored possible implications of the emerging insights and outlined next steps in the project. In addition to presentations, there was a moderated Q&A and discussion.

Recording: YouTube / Audio / Slides

Avac Event

CROI 2019

The annual Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) will take place March 4-7 in Seattle, Washington. Read on to review the coverage, access webcasts of conference sessions and to check out what caught AVAC’s attention.

Program Agenda
The full program conference agenda is available.

Community Reception
Join us and a number of partners for dinner and drinks at our annual CROI community reception! We’ll be at the Tap House on Tuesday, March 5 at 6:15pm. Flyer available.

CROI 2019 Press Conferences
CROI press conferences may be viewed live via Zoom video conferences or over the phone. Click here for full details on what’s available and how to access these conferences.

Follow Along From Close and Afar
aidsmap will have full coverage of the conference. And, as always, look for real-time updates from AVAC’s Twitter feed.

Avac Event

9th SA AIDS Conference 2019

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.

Avac Event

Webinar — How to Measure Success: Improving our national HIV prevention indicators

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

Avac Event

Webinar: The multipurpose prevention role of condoms in the context of SRH/HIV linkages

The male and female latex condom is the single, most efficient, available technology to reduce the sexual transmission of HIV and prevent unintended pregnancy. The search for new preventive and treatment technologies such as pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), HIV vaccines, microbicides and male hormonal contraceptives continue to make progress, but condoms will remain a key component of combination prevention strategies individuals can choose at different times in their lives to reduce their risks of sexual exposure to HIV and prevent unintended pregnancy.

The Department of Reproductive Health and Research (RHR) is pleased to convene this webinar exploring the multipurpose prevention role of condoms in the context of these SRH/HIV linkages.

Register here.

Avac Event

Webinar: Time to Protection for PrEP

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.

Avac Event

Advancing Women’s Empowerment: How to Inspire Use of HIV Prevention Innovations Among Young Women?

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

Avac Event

Hormonal contraception and HIV: Putting new developments in context

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.

Avac Event

Webinar: CDC and WHO Review Current PrEP Guidelines

Hundreds of people tuned in to hear researchers discuss the available data on “time to protection” required for effective oral PrEP with TDF/FTC—i.e., how many doses must be taken to build up protective levels of the drug in the blood? The answer is—it varies. Not surprisingly then, so do the guidelines for PrEP use.

As webinar participants learned, the data are varied and subject to interpretation. The World Health Organization (WHO) and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommend different time frames to reach protection in their respective guidelines for oral PrEP use. Both of these recommendations are based on measurements of the amount of drug that accumulates in blood and/or tissue over a specific period of time. The studies of how drugs are taken into the body and how they leave the body is called “pharmacokinetics” and “pharmacodynamics” or “PK” and “PD” for short, as explained in our primer for advocates. There isn’t a single PK measurement that is associated with PrEP protection—so both WHO and CDC guidelines are based on inference.

AVAC hosted a follow-on webinar presentation where representatives from both the CDC and WHO reviewed their respective guidance development processes and the role, use, contexts and audience for guidance documents.

Watch the recording on YouTube, listen to an mp3 version or download the slides. Q&A starts approximately 55 minutes in.