HIV/AIDS: fight must go on

AMID a list of gripes that add to our summer of discontent, the one good story to tell today – World Aids Day – is the progress that the country has made against the pandemic.

Organisations such as the UN Joint Programme on Aids have praised our country for making extraordinary progress against the virus that used to kill us by the thousands. Thanks to the biggest antiretroviral (ARV) treatment programme in the world, our life expectancy has increased by double figures within a decade.

The average South African will now die as a pensioner, not as a 51-year-old as was the case in 2005.

The rate of mother-to-child transmission stood at 1.3% in 2017, down from 3.6% in 2011. This puts South Africa on track for eliminating mother-to-child transmission.

South Africa has made impressive progress in recent years in getting more people to test for HIV.

In 2017, the country reached the first of the 90-90-90 targets, with 90% of people living with HIV aware of their status, up from 66.2% in 2014. We have come a long way since the Aids crisis of the 1990s and early 2000s. In those early years, infection with HIV appeared to be a death sentence. Indeed millions of those who went on to develop Aids have died as a result of the disease.

Today, however, thanks to remarkable medical advances, HIV can be suppressed to the extent that patients do not get sick and don’t go on to infect others. But our efforts to prevent new infections are not nearly good enough. A quarter of the world’s new HIV infections take place in South Africa, with young women being the worst affected.

Then there is the problem that researchers euphemistically call “loss to follow-up”. This refers to patients on ARVS who disappear. And there are a lot of them.

Some studies say that around one-fifth of South Africans who start ARVS disappear. Some simply move and go to a new clinic where they resume their treatment, but others think they are well enough to stop taking their medicine. The longer people take ARVS, the more likely they are to quit as they feel that their risk of poor health has receded.

While we are doing well on some fronts, we dare not rest on our laurels as the HIV/AIDS foe is still formidable. Last year, there were 240000 new HIV infections in this country and 71000 deaths from Aids-related illnesses. With figures such as these, the fight must go on.