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Biomedical HIV prevention – the social complexities of achieving effectiveness
Roger Pebody, 2013-07-25 16:50:00
Public health officials, donors, epidemiologists, researchers and clinicians need to factor in the relevance of the social and the cultural if they are to see biomedical HIV prevention strategies – including treatment as prevention (TasP) and pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) – succeed in real-world settings, speakers told the 2nd International Conference for the Social Sciences and Humanities in HIV, held recently in Paris.
“TasP is a simple acronym that masks considerable complexity,” commented Professor Gary Dowsett of La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia.
Although modelling studies have ‘demonstrated’ that treatment as prevention (a programme of HIV testing and treatment) could eliminate HIV infections in societies such as South Africa and Vietnam, they have relied on utopian assumptions, such as 100% of people getting tested and 100% of diagnosed people taking antiretroviral treatment.
But the gaps in the ‘treatment cascade’ suggest that the world is much more complicated than this.
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