Conversations with young people about sex can lead to safer sexual behaviour, like delayed sexual debut, the use of condoms and other contraceptives, and having fewer concurrent sexual partners but we need to give learners and young people clear and reliable information so that they can make informed choices relating to their health, writes Julia Chaskalson.
An HIV prevention injection approved in South Africa, several promising developments on the tuberculosis front, the National Health Insurance Bill grinding its way through Parliament, no end in sight to healthcare worker shortages, another dire year for health in Gauteng – Spotlight wraps up 2022 in under 1 000 words.
South Africa is expected to begin piloting the HIV prevention injection early next year as one of several projects that experts hope will reveal the answers to some of the biggest questions about the future of the shot – who will deliver the injection, where, and how to sell people on the idea that just six shots a year could protect them from HIV. Laura Lopez Gonzalez reports.
Mary Selona, a community activist who heads up the Blood River Advice Centre in Limpopo, is putting women at the centre in her quest for social justice. Whether it is intervening when women are refused PrEP at clinics or in more immediate life-threatening situations relating to gender-based violence, Selona is leading from the front. Ufrieda Ho spoke to her as part of Spotlight’s Women in Health series.
In 2021, HIV was successfully suppressed in the bodies of around 63% of the close to eight million people living with HIV in South Africa. This is according to recent outputs from Thembisa, the leading mathematical model of HIV in South Africa. With the help of some graphs, Spotlight editor Marcus Low unpacks this and other key model outputs.
Special youth clinics appear to be an effective means of providing healthcare services to young people who otherwise might not engage with healthcare services. But is building more youth clinics realistic given our resource constraints, or is it better to focus on making ‘normal’ clinics more youth-friendly – or should we be looking beyond clinic-based healthcare services altogether? Tiyese Jeranji investigates.
The South African Health Products Regulatory Authority recently approved the use of the monthly dapivirine vaginal ring for women 18 years and older to reduce the risk of HIV infection. Thabo Molelekwa looks at the evidence for the ring’s efficacy and asks what plans there are for making it available to women in South Africa.
Even though the rate of new HIV infections in young women and adolescent girls remains stubbornly high, provision and uptake of pills that can prevent HIV infection have generally been slow and lagging. One potential solution presented at the recent Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections is to provide the pills at schools. Tiyese Jeranji reports.
An HIV prevention injection taken every two months was recently approved in the United States. Several HIV activists interviewed by Thabo Molelekwa say that access to the injection should be prioritised in South Africa and that we need to do a better job in rolling out the injection than we did with the rollout of prevention pills.
There is no time to waste in planning the South African rollout of cabotegravir (CAB LA), the long-lasting antiretroviral injection approved for use in the United States in December 2021, say local health experts.
A new study has analysed the change in the rate of new HIV infections from 2010 to 2019 and found that HIV incidence in South Africa has halved since 2010. This is mainly due to antiretroviral treatment and condom promotion, but male medical circumcision and behaviour change after HIV diagnosis had a role too, writes Leigh Johnson.
“Driving a fast car”; “getting the top three letters”; or “playing the lotto” – nearly 40 years from when HIV was first described, the virus is still a thing of euphemism and stigma. It’s also still infecting at least 4 000 people a day around the world, most of them young people, especially girls and young women. Ufrieda Ho reports.
