This finding suggests public health efforts will have to address the treatment barriers these men face – like poverty or homophobia – to meet the nation’s goal of ending the HIV epidemic by 2030.
HIV services must be comprehensive to ensure that people take their medication as prescribed and avoid onward transmission of the virus.
Even before the advent of COVID-19, donors had begun to exit HIV programmes with increasing frequency.
Stigma and criminalisation of same-sex relationships makes it difficult for transgender women and men who have sex with men to seek preventive services. This compounds their risk for HIV infection.
It is urgent and overdue to implement PrEP in pregnancy and during breastfeeding. Failure to do so allows ongoing avoidable HIV infection among women in South Africa and their infants.
The quest to find treatment for COVID-19, and the uncertainty surrounding the clinical outcome, necessitates the use of antibiotics in the treatment package.
Vaccination uptake is influenced by many factors and carries a variety of meanings – social, political, economic, ideological, moral as well as biological.
Dean Faculty of Health Sciences and Professor of Vaccinology at University of the Witwatersrand; and Director of the SAMRC Vaccines and Infectious Diseases Analytics Research Unit, University of the Witwatersrand
Principal Medical Scientist and Head of Laboratory for Antimalarial Resistance Monitoring and Malaria Operational Research, National Institute for Communicable Diseases
Professor and Programme Director, SA MRC Centre for Health Economics and Decision Science - PRICELESS SA (Priority Cost Effective Lessons in Systems Strengthening South Africa), University of the Witwatersrand