Source: channelnewsasia.com<\/p>\n
PARIS: The number of young people in South Africa receiving treatment for HIV has increased 10-fold within a decade, a major new study has found.<\/p>\n
South Africa has the largest number of HIV-positive people in the world, with around 7.2 million carrying the virus, which causes AIDS.<\/p>\n
Researchers studied more than 700,000 young people receiving treatment for the infection and found 10 times the number of adolescents aged between 15-19 being treated compared with 2010.<\/p>\n
Authors of the study, published in The Lancet HIV journal attributed the rise partly due to the success of AIDS prevention programmes that result in better detection and treatment rates.<\/p>\n
However they found that fewer than 50 per cent of young South Africans who present for HIV care go on to initiate antiretroviral therapy, which can prevent transmission and stops a patient developing AIDS.
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“Despite the upswing in numbers initiating therapy, barriers persist that prevent many adolescents from starting treatment,” said Mhairi Maskew from the University of Witwatersrand and the report’s lead author.<\/p>\n
These include concerns about stigma, a pervasive sense that clinics cannot guarantee patient confidentiality and increased domestic responsibilities for young people, especially in families where children have lost parents to HIV and AIDS.<\/p>\n
The study found that while those diagnosed with HIV were roughly split by gender, nine in 10 people actively receiving treatment were girls.<\/p>\n
The authors said this was consistent with far higher rates of sexually-transmitted HIV infection in young women compared to young men.<\/p>\n
AIDS deaths have declined globally since the peak of the epidemic in the early 2000s, but an international AIDS commission warned last year of a resurgence if the world’s booming adolescent population weren’t protected.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2056,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[62,52,608,53],"class_list":["post-2055","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-aids-hiv","tag-aids","tag-hiv","tag-south-africa","tag-treatment"],"yoast_head":"\n