February 2017

Feb 02, 2017

New ways to deal with the HIV / AIDS epidemic

Dear aidsfocus readers,

The coverage of World AIDS Day 2016 on Swiss television (SRF, 1st December 2016) was brief but impressive. It showed how attempts are being made to pursue new approaches in the fight against HIV/AIDS, far away in rural Lesotho. Directed by the Swiss doctor Niklaus Labhardt, small teams of local health workers are going from door to door, testing people for HIV.

This is, without a doubt, a mammoth undertaking, but it is also very effective when you consider that every fourth person in Lesotho is HIV positive. Thanks to a research project carried out by SolidarMed and the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute (Swiss TPH), people in a specific district in Lesotho now have the important chance to find out their HIV status and start treatment right there where they live and work.

Although it is now known that early diagnosis and timely treatment improve the prognosis dramatically, prevent the onset of AIDS and inhibit new infections, many people still do not have the opportunity to be tested and treated for HIV in such an effective manner. To meet the targets approved by the UN member states of providing around 95% of the 37 million HIV-positive people with treatment by 2030, approximately 17 million more people infected with HIV need to be reached. This does not only indicate the need for huge expansion in HIV testing, but also the closing of gaps in the supply of life-saving antiretroviral medications. To this day, primarily in West and Central Africa, people are turned away from treatment centres due to shortages in medication supplies, or only make it to the clinic when they are already terminally ill.

The vast numbers of bottlenecks and deficits in the provision of life-long treatment illustrates the fact that the available services are rarely aimed towards the reality of people’s lives and their individual needs. The ‘one size fits all’ approach, so commonly implemented in programmes, is unfair to many people affected and other approaches are necessary in order to prevent situations such as the one described below, which arise on a daily basis:

“The amount of time we spend at the health facility in the queues – a queue for triage, a queue for the nurse, a queue at the pharmacy and a queue for the labs – it's too much time. I want to come to the facility only twice a year... I have a life to live.” (Patricia Asero Achieng, person living with HIV in Kenya)

SolidarMed’s pilot project in Lesotho demonstrates that there are alternative ways to handling the epidemic and the provision of treatment. Read more about this exciting project, the specific challenges it faces, and the extent to which it promises success for other regions in our interview with the research director Dr Niklaus Labhardt (Swiss TPH, SolidarMed).

Martina Staenke
Collaborator communication Medicus Mundi Switzerland
mstaenke@medicusmundi.ch