New York Times: Intensive Anti-HIV Efforts Meet With Mixed Success in Africa
“Imagine that 90 percent of all people living with HIV were diagnosed and treated with drugs. Would that be sufficient to end the AIDS epidemic? Scientists tried to answer the question in three enormous studies published on Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine. … Results from three of the studies suggest that the strategy comes nowhere near bringing the rate of new infections with HIV, or incidence, down to zero. But all of the studies showed that incidence dropped by about 30 percent, and one found a decrease in HIV-related deaths. … One of the new studies, called Ya T’sie (a reference to teamwork in the Setswana language), focused on 15 pairs of villages in Botswana, while a second, called Search, examined 32 rural communities in Kenya and Uganda. The largest of the three studies, PopART, looked at 21 communities in Zambia and South Africa. Together, the studies cost more than $200 million and included nearly 1.5 million people…” (Mandavilli, 7/17).