Founded in 1988, the International AIDS Society (IAS) is the world’s largest association of HIV professionals, with members from more than 180 countries working on all fronts of the global AIDS response. The IAS is also the steward of the world’s two most prestigious HIV conferences – the International AIDS Conference and the IAS Conference on HIV Science.
Africa not on track to reach 2030 HIV/AIDS targets
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Africa not on track to reach 2030 HIV/AIDS targets
scidev.net - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from scidev.net Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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Nearly 1 million people are now taking pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), medicine that can slash the risk of HIV infections. While early use of the drug was mostly limited to Western nations, the number of users in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has now drastically increased, accounting for more than half of the world’s PrEP users.
Kate Segal at AVAC, a New York-based non-profit focused on global HIV prevention, presented the latest data on PrEP use at the virtual HIV Research for Prevention Conference on 26 January. She said there had been a major expansion of PrEP users in 2020, with a rise of more than 300,000 from the previous year. In SSA, expanded access saw the number of new users jump from 4154 in 2016 to more than 517,000 in 2020, representing 56 per cent of the global total.