United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon recently declared that the world will soon welcome a “generation free of AIDS”. His bold statement followed the release of latest UNAIDS research showing that across the globe new HIV infections have fallen by 35% and AIDS-related deaths by 41% since 2000.
…
Initiatives to reduce HIV transmission focus heavily on the use of anti-retroviral (ART) medication – a strategy known as ‘Treatment as Prevention’ or TasP. There are two aspects to TasP.
The first aspect is a course of ART medication that can be taken by HIV negative people before or after sex to prevent them acquiring HIV. The second is ART medication for people living with HIV.
ART is the great success story of HIV treatment. Access to ART means a person with HIV can expect to live a long, healthy life and that they will be much less likely to transmit HIV to others.
If most Australians living with HIV are using ART, and there is a continued emphasis on safe sex and safe drug use, then Australia is in a good position to achieve the 2020 goals.
However, the social reality is more complicated.
TasP means that prevention initiatives place emphasise the actions of people living with HIV. This potentially detracts from the sense of ‘shared responsibility’ for HIV prevention that characterised safe-sex campaigns.