Posts tagged capetown
It’s World Aids Day, and it’s time to prove HIV is in no way an automatic death sentence. The people of Khayelitsha in Cape Town, in creative collaboration with MSF, activists, artists and musicians, came together to urge young people to stand strong against the virus. (via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeS9YPkdVhI)
Getting Ahead of the Wave of New Infections
Khayelitsha is a large township on the outskirts of Cape Town, South Africa with a population of over 500,000 and one of the highest burdens of both HIV and TB in the world. An estimated 16% of the adult population is HIV-positive. MSF began providing ART in Khayelitsha in May 2001, and today supports ART provision to more than 17,000 people.
There are indications that as treatment has been scaled up in Khayelitsha, new HIV infections have decreased. An analysis of HIV prevalence data among pregnant women shows that the proportion of HIV positive pregnant women attending antenatal care had risen from 15.4% in 1999 to 31.4% in 2008. By 2010, that percentage had fallen to 26.3%. While other factors including deaths, out-migration, and behavior change may have played a role in this reduction, ART scale up is considered to be the strongest contributing factor in reducing new infections.
Learn more in our special report, “Getting Ahead of the Wave: Lessons for the Next Decade of the AIDS Response”