HIV News Around The Globe

Namibia becomes first African country to end mother-to-child HIV, Hepatitis B transmission

The World Health Organization (WHO) has said Namibia, a Southern African country, is the first high-burden nation globally to eliminate mother-to-child transmission of both HIV and Hepatitis B.

The global health body disclosed this in a statement on Monday. WHO said the country has saved 28,000 children from vertical transmission of HIV since 2010. The country achieved this by making HIV testing and treatment easily accessible to every pregnant woman. This initiative, WHO said, led to a 70 per cent reduction in child-to-mother transmission in the last 20 years.

WHO said in 2022, only 4 per cent of babies born to mothers living with HIV acquired the virus. Similarly, about 80 per cent of infants received a timely birth dose of the Hepatitis B vaccine. Namibia, WHO noted further, has integrated all its Primary Health Care Centres (PHC) with adequate antenatal, child, and reproductive health services.

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UNAIDS laments high HIV infections rate among key populations

The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) has decried the high infectious rate of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) among the key populations across the world

It said, across the world, key populations such as gay men and other men who have sex with men, sex workers, transgender people, people who inject drugs, incarcerated people and their partners continue to be disproportionately affected by HIV.

The UNAIDS Deputy Executive Director, Programmes and Assistant UN Secretary-General, Dr Angeli Achrekar, in her keynote address at the ongoing 2024 Nigeria HIV Prevention Conference in Abuja, therefore, recommended that urgent action must be taken to end inequalities that fuel the AIDS epidemic.

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Breakthrough study offers hope for an effective HIV cure

By 2030, the World Health Organization (WHO), the Global Fund and UNAIDS are hoping to end the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and AIDS epidemic. An international team of researchers led by Eric Arts, professor at the Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry, and Jamie Mann, senior lecturer at the University of Bristol (U.K.), has brought us another step closer to meeting this goal, by finding an effective and affordable targeted treatment strategy for an HIV cure. 

In a first, the study published in the journal Emerging Microbes and Infections demonstrated the team's patented therapeutic candidate, an HIV-virus-like-particle (HLP), is 100 times more effective than other candidate HIV cure therapeutics for people living with chronic HIV on combined antiretroviral therapy (cART). If successful in clinical trials, HLP could be used by millions of people living around the world to free them of HIV. This study was done using blood samples from people living with chronic HIV. 

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ESCMID 2024: Long-acting injectables for HIV prevention

The implementation of PrEP throughout the European and Central Asia regions is suboptimal and varies markedly by country.

At the 34th European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ESCMID) Global (formerly ECCMID) conference in Barcelona, Spain, the use of long-acting combined antiretroviral therapy (ART) injectables for the prevention of HIV infection in Europe and Central Asia (ECA) was discussed at a symposium on HIV prevention.

Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) refers to ART taken by HIV-negative people to reduce the risk of HIV infection. Most commonly, PrEP is administered orally on a daily basis. Currently, World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines recommend PrEP for key populations considered to have an increased risk of HIV infection, such as sex workers, men who have sex with men (MSM), people who inject drugs (PWID), people in prisons and other closed settings, and transgender and gender diverse (TGD) people.

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Breakthrough vaccine strategy guides the immune system to generate HIV neutralizing antibodies

A team led by the Duke Human Vaccine Institute (DHVI) has developed a vaccine approach that works like a GPS, guiding the immune system through the specific steps to make broadly neutralizing antibodies against HIV.

Publishing in the journal Cell Host & Microbe, the study describes an approach that provides step-by-step directions for the immune system to generate the elusive, yet necessary antibodies for a successful HIV vaccine. HIV is the fastest-evolving virus known. So it's been a long-standing goal in HIV research to create a vaccine that can generate broadly neutralizing antibodies that can recognize diverse HIV strains."

Kevin Wiehe, Ph.D., lead author, associate professor in the Department of Medicine at Duke University School of Medicine and director of research at DHVI. Wiehe and colleagues started with an engineered version of a broadly neutralizing antibody in its original state, before any mutations occurred. Knowing that the antibody will need to mutate to keep up with the ever-changing HIV virus, the researchers then added sequential mutations one-by-one to determine which mutations were essential for the antibody to broadly neutralize HIV.

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