Ten months after an enabling court judgment, some pharmacists in South Africa can finally start applying for permits that allows them to dispense HIV prevention pills without a script from a doctor. Catherine Tomlinson reports.
The United States National Institutes of Health has lifted its ban nearly 18 months after an order to stop work with South Africa. The funding ban created a crisis for HIV and TB research, including NIH grants and US Agency for International Development aid. Many of the world’s major advances over the past two decades in understanding the science of HIV arose from South African scientists and from studies conducted here, the vast majority of them funded by the NIH.
HIV is known for its ability to outsmart our immune system’s normal defences. A small number of people living with HIV are however able to generate more effective immune responses to HIV. In this special briefing, Catherine Tomlinson zooms in on broadly neutralising antibodies, the secret sauce in these immune responses.
Long before she became a pioneering scientist, Professor Liesl Zühlke insisted on seeing her tonsils after they were removed when she was just five years old. Today, paediatric cardiology is close to her heart, and her research has helped answer critical questions in the entire pipeline of heart disease.
Dr Hermann Reuter did pioneering work treating HIV in the early 2000s in Cape Town and in the rural Eastern Cape. Today, his focus is substance abuse, which he believes is the country’s biggest health issue after HIV. Sue Segar spent time with him to learn about his work in the Garden Route city of George.
South Africa has an ageing population of people living with HIV. For the first time a set of clinical guidelines maps out a framework to help keep this group of people healthier for longer, reports Elna Schütz.
If an HIV prevention pill that provides a month of protection at a time performs well in two ongoing clinical trials, it could become the next big thing in HIV prevention after the lenacapavir injection. A new licensing agreement is paving the way for South Africa’s Aspen Pharmacare to produce the pill should the study findings be positive and the drug be registered.
A new antiretroviral combination pill that is taken only once a week appears to work as well as daily pills at treating HIV. This is according to interim study findings to be presented next week at the AIDS 2026 conference in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
An NGO offers safe, private HIV services to Men who Have Sex with Men and transgender people in George. Sue Segar met with some of the people using these services, and found the NGO, TB HIV Care are already providing relief from the hostile reactions trans people sometimes experience in government clinics.
Eight months after the Supreme Court of Appeal gave the green light for specially trained pharmacists to dispense antiretrovirals without a script from a doctor, the programme remains stuck in the starting blocks. With enabling permits now seemingly on the horizon, Angela Tembo and Dr Deanne Johnston ask if there has been sufficient planning to make the initiative a success.
As South Africa marks 50 years since the June 1976 youth uprising for a dream of freedom, a new generation of young people dreaming of an HIV-free future gave their time, trust, and participation to help deliver a breakthrough new HIV prevention product that was launched this June, writes Ntando Yola.
With a new six-monthly injection, South Africa last week launched the most promising new HIV prevention tool in years, but much of the infrastructure that made HIV prevention services accessible to high-risk groups has been dismantled over the last year. Amy Green asks whether we can successfully deliver this breakthrough technology without the trusted pathways that were decimated by cuts to aid from the United States.
