Young people with innovative ideas to reduce HIV infections among adolescents will receive cash incentives to showcase best practices to fight the deadly virus during an international conference in Kisumu.

At least 600 youthful delegates from Eastern and Southern Africa are expected to submit proposals at the conference dubbed ‘30 Under 30 Awards.’

This comes at a time when most new HIV infections occur among adolescents and young people aged between 15and 24 years.

HIV PREVENTION

The young people will present their practices and innovation in HIV prevention, care and treatment during the first ever international Conference of reducing HIV in adolescents and youth set to be held on June 14-19 in the Lakeside City.

The youth, whose presentation will win, will receive a seed funding of Sh500,000.

The conference is the brain child of Impact Research and Development Organisation (IRDO), the Kenya Medical Research Institute (Kemri) and Nyanza Initiatives for Girls Education and Empowerment (Nigee).

Speaking to the Nation IRDO Director Kawango Agot said half of the presenters at the Kisumu conference will be adolescents and young people under 30 years.

INNOVATIVE IDEAS

“Youth under 30 years with innovative ideas on reducing HIV, especially among adolescent girls and young women, will receive seed funding and mentorship to implement their projects,” said Dr Agot.

She urged young people to submit proposals and share their work with other youth from Kenya and Eastern and Southern Africa to reduce the burden of the disease among their peers.

However, she said youth above 30 years can also submit their abstracts which must be based on data from adolescents and young people of the age bracket of 10-24 years.

At the same time, Dr Agot announced that youth whose abstracts and proposals will be selected, will not pay registration fee.

 “We are also encouraging organisations with youth led best practices on HIV and reproductive health programmes to apply before February 28 deadline,” said Dr Agot.

Dr Agot, who has been in the frontline in the fight against HIV in Nyanza region, appealed to well-wishers including county governments, managers of the National Government Constituency Development Fund (NG-CDF) to sponsor young people from their respective regions  to attend the conference.

“The fight against HIV among the youth must not be left to government and non-governmental organisations alone. All the actors from the grassroots must join hands to reduce the burden that is still a threat to the future and prosperity of this country,” said Dr Agot.

NASCOP

A recent report by national Aids and Sexually Transmitted Infections Control Programme revealed that at least eight counties account for 50 per cent of all new HIV infections.

Six of the counties that experts have raised red flag over the increasing new infections are in Western and Nyanza. Other cases have been reported in Nairobi and Rift Valley.

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After 40 years, despite breakthroughs in the treatment and prevention of HIV/AIDS, Canadian scientists working in Kenya are still up against a stubborn roadblock: How do you encourage people to get tested for HIV?

“On paper, we have the means of dealing with the epidemic. But in practice, it is very different,” said Larry Gelmon, an associate professor at the University of Manitoba and director of the university’s program in Kenya. “We have the solutions. The research issues [now] are how do you get those solutions to the people who need them?”

Scientists from Winnipeg are gathering in Nairobi this week, marking the 40th anniversary of a research partnership, initially established between the University of Manitoba and the University of Nairobi before the world became aware of HIV/AIDS to try to control sexually transmitted infections in Kenya. That partnership, called the University of Manitoba-University of Nairobi Collaborative Research Program, grew to include researchers from the United States, Belgium and other Canadian universities, and it turned its attention to HIV/AIDS as the disease swept Africa in the 1980s.

The group’s work is far from over. In 2018, 25.7 million people were living with HIV in Africa and 1.1 million were infected that year, accounting for two-thirds of new HIV infections globally, according to the World Health Organization.

Over the decades, Dr. Gelmon said, the focus of the research collaborative has shifted from learning about HIV in the 1980s to trying to find a way to create a vaccine in the 1990s, which was unsuccessful. Since then, he said, it has focused on the social and cultural issues hindering the prevention and treatment of infection.

With the right medications, people with HIV can now live long lives. Although the death toll has plunged in Africa and around the world, the WHO estimates 470,000 people in Africa died of HIV-related causes in 2018 – more than 60 per cent of the estimated 770,000 deaths globally that year.

“A lot of the stigma and prejudice that prevented people from getting tested 30 years ago is still happening,” Dr. Gelmon said, adding that even though treatment is now available, many are hesitant to be treated because they do not want others to know they are HIV-positive.

For sex workers, anti-retroviral medications can be taken before having sex as a pre-exposure prophylactic to protect themselves, he added, but they are often reluctant to carry the pills for fear others will assume they are infected.

“So, to a large extent, the research that we’re doing now is how do you get people to get tested? How do you encourage them, if they’re on treatment, to stay on their treatment?” he said.

This involves various qualitative, operational research projects aimed at trying to figure out the best way to implement treatments and preventative measures beyond the laboratory and clinical settings. For instance, the group is working with sex workers in Nairobi to provide peer education, conduct HIV testing and hand out condoms in the places where they work, such as bars, clubs, hotels and bus stops.

Researchers are also working on new methods to prevent infection that are accessible and could be readily adopted. For example, building upon decades of the group’s research, Keith Fowke, head of the University of Manitoba’s department of medical microbiology and infectious diseases, is testing the use of a low daily dose of aspirin to block inflammation, as a way of preventing HIV target cells from getting into the genital tract.

Taking a pill every day would not be ideal for everyone, Dr. Fowke said. But for women at high risk of exposure to the virus, particularly sex workers, the common anti-inflammatory drug could turn out be an affordable, socially acceptable prevention tool they could add to their arsenal, he said.

Meanwhile, researchers have not abandoned their efforts to develop a vaccine or a cure.

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The Mizoram government has sought assistance from the United Nations to contain the spread of HIV infection in the hilly state, official sources said. Mizoram health minister R Lalthangliana, who is currently on a tour to the US, recently called on the international director of the ‘United Nations Programme on HIV and AIDS’ (UNAIDS) in Washington DC, Regan Hofmann, to apprise her of the scenario in the state. Apart from financial aid, the health minister also sought logistic support from UNAIDS to combat the menace in Mizoram, they said, adding that the UN has promised to provide all possible assistance.

Officials of Mizoram State AIDS Control Society (MSACS) said more than 2,400 people have died due to AIDS since 1990, when the first case was detected in the state. According to an MSACS official, 2.04 per cent of the state’s nearly 11 lakh population suffer from the disease.

On an average, nine people are diagnosed HIV positive every day in Mizoram, he stated. In more than 67 per cent of the cases, the virus has been transmitted sexually, while 28.12 per cent of those infected have contracted the disease from infected needles. In December, Mizoram Kohhran Hruaitute Committee (MKHC), a conglomerate of major churches in the state, had passed a resolution to fight the menace. As part of its campaign to spread awareness, the Mizoram government recently said that it was planning to introduce a chapter on AIDS in school curriculum.

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A discovery by Florida State University College of Medicine researchers is expected to open the door for new and more potent treatment options for many of the more than 36 million people worldwide infected with the HIV virus and for others chronically ill with hepatitis B.

Their work has established for the first time the mechanism responsible for how two widely used antiviral drugs inhibit viruses.

In a paper published by Communications Biology, an open-access journal from Nature Research, Professor Zucai Suo and colleagues also provide the key to understanding how a single HIV-1 mutation can inactivate the anti-HIV drugs emtricitabine and lamivudine. Those drugs are worth billions in annual sales for the companies that make them, and the frequency of patients who develop resistance creates serious and dangerous obstacles to controlling the disease.

Emtricitabine also is approved for use in patients with hepatitis B, which afflicts 270 million people worldwide, according to the World Health Organization.

The paper suggests new pathways for developing drugs able to avoid specific virus mutations that can render these two blockbuster L-nucleoside drug treatments ineffective for many patients.

It’s not unusual for patients undergoing treatment to develop a resistance to their prescribed anti-HIV medications, leaving physicians with three options: adjust the treatment regimen, temporarily interrupt therapy or continue with an only partially effective regimen.

For patients who have failed their first treatment regimen, or even a second, doctors typically try to salvage the current course of treatment by adjusting the combination of drugs. But for patients who have failed multiple treatment regimens, there are limited options to suppress the incurable virus.

The number of drug choices available when one combination fails is limited. More than a million of those infected with HIV live in the U.S.

“In our paper, we suggest new chemical possibilities for more potent L-nucleoside analog drugs, which may possess different drug-resistance mutation profiles from the most widely used current anti-HIV drugs,” said Suo, the study’s co-lead author, and an Eminent Professor and the Dorian and John Blackmon Chair in Biomedical Science at the FSU College of Medicine. Eric Lansdon of Gilead Sciences Inc. is the co-lead author.

“Right now, there are a limited number of FDA-approved drugs available,” Suo said. “New drugs need to be developed if doctors are to have other options when treating so many patients who may have developed resistance to most of the FDA-approved anti-HIV drugs.”

The drugs remain highly effective in keeping the disease under control for most patients, but some patients develop a resistance due to mutations within the HIV virus.

Suo’s paper explains how the class of HIV drugs known as L-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors (L-NRTIs) work. L-NRTIs block an enzyme that HIV needs to replicate, but they were discovered through blind trials. Important details about the underlying mechanism triggering L-NRTIs have remained a mystery, as well as a source of controversy among the scientists who study them.

“The enzyme has a unique pocket and supposedly recognizes NRTIs, but not their structural mirror images—L-NRTIs,” said Suo, who grew curious about the mechanism behind L-NRTI drugs as a graduate student. He’s been motivated since then to understand and explain the mechanism involved, which he does in his paper—one of six he has published involving L-NRTI research.

Suo’s current paper also explains how a mutation found in some patient populations leads to developing resistance to antiviral L-NRTI drugs.

“Patients, HIV scientists and medical doctors all will benefit from this,” Suo said. “HIV scientists and drug companies will now know how it works and will be able to design better drugs in the same class of medications. They will be able to build on the mechanism described in this paper to make slight adjustments for better and more powerful treatment options.”

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Global gains made in AIDS fight are under threat due to declining political commitment and funding, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organization (WHO), said here on Monday.

At an international AIDS conference, the WHO chief said in 2018, 770,000 people died from HIV and 1.7 million people were newly infected and the vast majority of these cases and deaths occurred in Africa.

An AIDS-free world can be achieved with “innovation, community engagement and political leadership,” he told the opening ceremony of the International Conference on AIDS and Sexually Transmitted Infections in Africa (ICASA) that runs in Dec. 2-7 in Kigali.

HIV pandemic will remain a global challenge in the foreseeable future, said ICASA president John Idoko.

He called upon the governments to seek domestic solutions for a sustainable response against HIV/AIDS in Africa.

Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame said at the opening ceremony that stigma and silence are “real killers” for sexually transmitted infections, as they hinder people from learning and accepting their status.

“Open dialogue saves lives,” the president said.

The conference held under the theme “AIDS-free Africa” drew nearly 8,000 participants including leaders, activists, scientists and researchers from across the world to discuss the role of political leadership, collaboration and innovation in advancing efforts to end AIDS by 2030.

More than 37 million people were living with HIV worldwide in 2018, where Africa accounted for about one in every 25 adults infected with the virus, according to the WHO.

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The Wellness Unit of the department of public works held a build-up event for World Aids Day in Middledrift, under the theme “Ending the HIV/Aids community”. A candle light prayer was also held to show support to those affected by the virus. Wellness practitioner Nwabisa Malgas said the event’s purpose was to honour those who had passed away and to give hope to those living with the virus.

“We are honouring our people who have lost their battle with the virus and we are also standing in solidarity with those who still continue living with HIV/Aids, by encouraging them to live a healthy lifestyle and take their medication accordingly,” Malgas said.

Most of the people attending the event were accelerated professional and trade competency development programme (APTCoD) learners.

“As the Wellness Unit, we felt it was important to bring the educational session to this particular depot as this would equip the learners with the necessary life skills needed to combat the spread of HIV/Aids,” Malgas explained.

She said peer educators from Middledrift had organised the event and had invited nurses from local clinics to conduct a candle light prayer.

Wellness Unit assistant director Zoliswa Soso said their mandate was to ensure all public works employees were in

good health, in order to minimise absenteeism. “We have observed over time that there are undesirable behaviours among employees that are becoming a problem including alcohol abuse, financial burdens and absenteeism and it is our responsibility to tackle these issues without favour or prejudice,” Soso said.

DPW’s Wellness Unit promotes the management of HIV/Aids, diabetes and cancer, along with other illnesses, and provides a supportive environment for affected or infected employees.

“As long as HIV/Aids is around, we will all be around to assist and educate those in need by providing the necessary educational information, together with a support base that will equip employees in better understanding the virus,” she said. She reminded the audience that the event was not to judge anyone but served as a reminder that HIV/Aids was real and had to be taken seriously.

“Ours is not to tell you how to live your life but purely to make you aware of the risks associated with making reckless decisions that will eventually affect those around you. “Under this theme, we can make a difference and bring change to the people around us if we stand together in the fight against HIV/Aids,” Soso said.

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Aizawl: A few weeks after his meeting with Mizoram Government Doctors’ Association, state health and family welfare minister Dr R Lalthangliana on Monday invited the Mizoram Kohhran Hruaitu Committee (church leaders’ committee) along with medical experts from the Mizoram State Aids Control Society (MSACS) to discuss the prevalence of HIV/AIDS cases in the state.

At the meeting, the minister stated that though Mizoram has a good health record, the spread of HIV/AIDS in the last few years has accelerated — particularly between 2013 and 2014 — at an alarming rate.

He stressed that a new prevention and awareness campaign on HIV/AIDS needs to be taken up and called on church leaders to ramp up the awareness campaigns among the youths.

Reports from MSACS director Dr Lalthlengliani indicated that in 2018 alone, 2,557 cases of HIV/AIDS were detected, of which 843 were from Aizawl district alone. She stated that nine positive cases of HIV/AIDS are reported in Mizoram every day, with the most vulnerable people aged between 25 and 34 years.

Dr Lalthlengliani also stated that the elimination of ‘infected mother to child transmission’ shall be started from 2020.

According to the Mizoram State AIDS Control Society (MSACS), 67.21% of HIV-positive cases from 2006 to March 2019 were transmitted sexually, while 28.12% cases were through infected needles shared by intravenous drug users.

Data compiled by the National AIDS Control Organization (NACO) in 2017 showed that 2.04% of Mizoram’s population is found to be HIV-positive against the national average of 0.2%. This puts the state with the highest record of HIV prevalence followed by Manipur (1.43%) and Nagaland (1.15%).

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I may be retired from the news business, but I still know a good story when I see one. Reports now tell us that more children than ever are growing up free of deadly diseases such as AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria.

Just 20 years ago, a very different picture was being painted. AIDS was ravaging an entire generation; hundreds of thousands of children were dying before their 5th birthday simply due to a single bite from a malaria-infected mosquito; and TB spread like wildfire in many impoverished communities, leaving family members sick and unable to work.

My dear friend, the late former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan called the fight against this loss of humanity “the greatest challenge of our generation” and quickly asked the United Nations Foundation, which I had recently launched at the time, to help be a part of the solution.

We joined with a range of partners to support the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which brings together governments, advocates, and experts to mobilize resources, coordinate efforts, and invest in innovative programs that are turning the tide against these three devastating diseases.

The work of the Global Fund has changed the landscape when it comes to AIDS, TB, and malaria: 18.9 million more people are now living long lives with HIV treatment and 131 million mosquito nets were distributed just last year to protect children around the world from the threat of malaria. Because of public and private sector partners uniting to take a stand, the Global Fund partnership has saved nearly 32 million lives and reduced the number of deaths caused by these three diseases by 40% in countries where the Global Fund invests its support.

Think about that: 32 million lives saved. That’s more than three times the population of the state of Georgia being given the opportunity to live healthy, productive lives all because people came together in partnership to fight, refusing a world where AIDS, TB, and malaria are allowed to destroy our communities.

This is a good news story so far — but how it ends is still to be determined. Right now, the progress we’ve made against these diseases is very fragile and, in some cases, such as with malaria, it’s stalled due to insufficient resources and lack of political will to carry on the fight.

It’s up to all of us to decide whether we protect the progress we’ve made and keep moving forward or become complacent and watch on as these diseases gain ground once again. If we lose progress on health, so much more around the world is at risk — from the stability of communities to the productivity of businesses.

We’re a mere 10 years out from the 2030 deadline to achieve a better future for people and our planet to which we committed under the Sustainable Development Goals – the world’s shared to-do list, adopted by nations worldwide four years ago. The success of the Global Fund’s efforts is linked to the success of these global goals — from ending poverty to achieving gender equality to ensuring health for all.

On Oct. 10 in Lyon, France, many countries and private sector partners stood up for progress, pledging more than $14 billion for the Global Fund’s work over the next three years. While these pledges are very important, they are not enough. All of us, especially engaged citizens like you and me, need to keep raising our voices to make sure that the fight against AIDS, TB, and malaria remains a priority on the global agenda.

We need others to step up the fight and contribute to achieving the world that my friend Kofi envisioned. We need more compassion, more engagement and most importantly, more collective action than we currently see in our often-fractured world. I call on private sector partners, country governments, and global citizens to help us all deliver on our promise for a better world.

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When Paul Haggis and  Dan Krauss set out to make their documentary “5B,” about the first AIDS ward at San Francisco General Hospital, they originally wanted to tell a story about nursing in 2019. Their mandate for the film, which was financed by Johnson & Johnson, was to tell a story about nursing.

Krauss told the audience at the International Documentary Association’s (IDA) annual screening series that, initially, he thought he’d be traveling to a far-flung location — not one 10 miles from his home in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“We had a vision of traveling to global hotspots and following nurses in Haiti and more contemporary, frontline nursing stories,” Krauss said. “I wish I could take credit for discovering the story, but all credit really belongs to the researchers who were heading the work of finding our story. They came to me one day and said, ‘You know about the story: the first AIDS ward.’ So we had spent a lot of time looking for stories in far-flung parts of the globe, and 10 miles from my house was this incredible story that had been preserved, like an insect in amber, for over 30 years, just sitting there.”

Haggis and Krauss interviewed many of the nurses who helped build the ward, including Cliff Morrison, who spearheaded the project, along with other important figures, including television reporter Hank Plante. At the time, Plante was one of the only openly gay reporters telling the story of his community in San Francisco, and much of the news footage used in the film belongs to him.

“I kind of knew back then, covering AIDS from the very beginning, that this was obviously going to be very big as a story,” Plante said. “And so I started keeping my stories. And not just on videotape — videotape disintegrates — I started keeping them and transferring them to DVD… By the time these researchers called 30 years later, I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll send you three DVDs.’”

It was a difficult assignment to cover, one that forced him to step out of the frame and cry on occasion, but Plante said it was also a “blessing.”

“It’s the work that I’m proudest of in my life,” he said. “I’m grateful that when I got to San Francisco, I had worked in TV for a few years, so I knew how to do the job. I was out, so I’ve taken care of that. And I was ready. And then AIDS came along, and I was ready to cover it. But yeah, it did get to me. It was more than a story to me. These were my friends who were dying. There were many times when I would be at General and I would have to go out into the hallway and compose myself and come back and finish the story. But you know, I had a job to do, and I wasn’t about to cry on TV. The shot of me standing at the AIDS quilt? I was crying right before that.”

He added, “But I say it’s a blessing because we were so powerless in the beginning when AIDS came along. There was nothing — there were no drugs. There was no hope. And so for me, covering it was a way to channel my grief and my anger.”

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The gap between the resources needed and those available is widening, as donors provide less funding, and domestic investments grow too slowly to compensate for inflation.

UNAIDS estimates that some $26.2 billion is needed by 2020 the 2018 amount available for the AIDS response was approximately $7.2 billion short of that figure.

‘Key populations’ at high risk

The report reveals that, from 2010 to 2018, the number of new HIV infections declined by 16 per cent, with around 1.7 million people infected in 2018. The drop is driven mostly by steady progress across most of eastern and southern Africa.

However, the picture looks very different – and far less positive – in other regions, which have seen a rising number of cases In eastern Europe and central Asia, AIDS-related deaths have risen by five per cent and, in the Middle East and North Africa, by nine per cent, since 2010.Key populations — which include people who inject drugs, gay men and other men who have sex with men, transgender people, sex workers and prisoners—now account for more than half of new HIV infections globally.

In eastern Europe and central Asia and in the Middle East and North Africa, that figure rises dramatically to around 95 per cent, which highlights that key populations are still being marginalized and being left behind in the response to HIV.

We urgently need increased political leadership to end AIDS, said Gunilla Carlsson, acting Executive Director of UNAIDS. This starts with investing adequately and smartly, and by looking at what’s making some countries so successful. Ending AIDS is possible if we focus on people, not diseases, and take a human rights-based approach to reaching people most affected by HIV.

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Cape Town – A new UN report shows that while important progress has been made in addressing the Aids epidemic for children and adolescents, countries failed to meet the goals set for 2018.

South Africa represents 9% of children acquiring HIV through vertical transmission across the world, only topped by Nigeria and Mozambique.

While this seems like a bad indication of how HIV/Aids is being handled, Scott McQuade from the South African branch of UNAids said otherwise.

“South Africa has the largest population of people living with HIV, about 20% of the global burden. Having only 9% of the global burden of vertical transmission indicates the relative success of South Africa in moving towards elimination of mother-to-child transmission.”

The Western Cape further beats the odds. In its 2018 report, the Health Department reported a 0.2% mother-to-child HIV transmission rate at 10 weeks. The most recent data indicate that 12.6% of adults in the Western Cape have HIV, the lowest rate of all provinces. The city and NGOs continue to urge people to get tested and educated about HIV prevention.

The Joint UN Programme on HIV/Aids (UNAids) in partnership with the US President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief introduced the Start Free Stay Free Aids Free framework and goals in 2016. The programme sought to end Aids as a public health threat for children and adolescents by focusing on 23 countries (mainly in Africa and Asia) with high numbers of children, adolescents and young women with HIV.

The programme had three main goals. To ensure 95% of pregnant women living with HIV knew their status and were on antiretroviral therapy (ART), to reduce the number of women aged 10-24 acquiring HIV to fewer than 100000 annually by 2020, and to make sure that 95% of all adolescents 10-19 years of age with HIV are receiving ART by 2020. They missed the mark in 2018 and indicators for 2020 are not looking too optimistic.

The 23 countries in the focus group for the programme represent 86% of pregnant women with HIV, 80% of children ages 0-14 acquiring HIV, 85% of girls and women ages 10-25 acquiring HIV, and 85% of young people ages 0-19 living with HIV.

South Africa was one of the countries included in the programme.

The new UNAids report shows that many of the countries studied made significant strides in reducing HIV among young people, but overall their efforts fell short. Children are a difficult group to target with these efforts. Vertical transmission of HIV is still a major problem and according to the study, only 63% of infants exposed to HIV during birth were tested before two months of age. South Africa tested more than 85% of babies exposed to HIV in the first two months.

But the fight to eradicate HIV and Aids in South Africa needs to be increased. According to the UNAids study, less than 30% of men and women ages 15-24 have a comprehensive understanding of HIV prevention.

This problem is exacerbated by an intense lack of funding to combat Aids – global numbers indicate that funding decreased by $1billion (R14bn) last year.

According to the report, the geographic concentration of where children are most acquiring HIV is so substantial that changes in only a few countries could improve global trends.

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