Related papers: Combination prevention for the elimination of HIV
South Africa has more people infected with HIV but, by providing access to anti-retroviral therapy (ART), has kept more people alive than any other country. The effectiveness, availability and affordability of potent anti-retroviral therapy…
Access to combination antiretroviral treatment (ART) has improved greatly over recent years. At the end of 2011, more than eight million HIV infected people were receiving antiretroviral therapy in low-income and middle-income countries.…
Anti-retroviral drugs can reduce the infectiousness of people living with HIV by about 96%--treatment as prevention or TasP--and can reduce the risk of being infected by an HIV positive person by about 70%--pre-exposure prophylaxis or…
The extent to which ART (anti-retroviral therapy) reduces HIV transmission has received attention in recent years. Using data on the relationship between transmission and viral load we show that transmission saturates at high viral loads.…
The prevalence of HIV in West Africa is lower than elsewhere in Africa but Gabon has one of the highest rates of HIV in that region. Gabon has a small population and a high per capita gross domestic product making it an ideal place to carry…
A simple deterministic model is proposed to represent the basic aspects concerning the effects of different antiretroviral treatment schedules on HIV incidence and prevalence of affected populations. The model mimics current treatment…
Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) consists in the use of an antiretroviral medication to prevent the acquisition of HIV infection by uninfected individuals and has recently demonstrated to be highly efficacious for HIV prevention. We propose…
If people at risk of HIV infection are tested annually and started on treatment as soon as they are found to be HIV-positive it should be possible to reduce the case reproduction number for HIV to less than one, eliminate transmission and…
Sexual contacts are the main spreading route of HIV. This puts sex workers at higher risk of infection even in populations where HIV prevalence is moderate or low. Alongside condom use, Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) is an effective tool…
The United Nations Joint Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) has set a target to ensure that 15 million HIV-positive people in the world would be receiving combination anti-retroviral treatment (ART) by 2015. This target is likely to be reached…
In several countries in southern Africa, including South Africa, the prevalence of HIV remains stubbornly high in spite of considerable efforts to reduce transmission and to provide anti-retroviral therapy (ART). It is important to know the…
At present, the best hope for eliminating HIV transmission and bringing the epidemic of HIV to an end lies in the use of anti-retroviral therapy for prevention, a strategy referred to variously as Test and Treat (T&T), Treatment as…
A central challenge in Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) public health policy lies in determining whether to universally expand treatment access, despite the risk of sub-optimal adherence and consequent drug resistance, or to adopt a more…
In a recent article Hontelez and colleagues investigate the prospects for elimination of HIV in South Africa through expanded access to antiretroviral therapy (ART) using STDSIM, a micro-simulation model. One of the first published models…
The epidemic of HIV in Angola started later and stabilized at lower levels than elsewhere in southern Africa. With a relatively small population and a high GDP, Angola is in a good position to intervene decisively to control HIV. The…
The epidemic of HIV in Malawi started early and at its peak 15% of all adults were infected with HIV. Malawi is a low-income country and the cost of putting all HIV-positive people in Malawi onto ART, expressed as a percentage of the gross…
The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV and AIDS (UNAIDS) has set a new 90-90-90 global target for the coverage of anti-retroviral therapy (ART) to be reached by 2020. This would mean that 90% of all people infected with HIV know their…
Background: After a decade of a treatment as prevention (TasP) strategy based on progressive HIV testing scale-up and earlier treatment, a reduction in the estimated number of new infections in men-who-have-sex-with-men (MSM) in England had…
This paper investigates the effect of drug treatment on the standard within-host HIV model, assuming that therapy occurs periodically. It is shown that eradication is possible under these periodic regimes, and we quantitatively characterize…
In this paper, we construct a model to describe the transmission of HIV in a homogeneous host population. By considering the specific mechanism of HIV, we derive a model structured in three successive stages: (i) primary infection, (ii)…