The health agency, Unitaid, will finance the introduction in Brazil and South Africa of an innovative preventive treatment for HIV, a long-acting injectable treatment, it indicated on Friday.
“Unitaid today announces an agreement to begin use in South Africa and Brazil of an injection that will protect HIV users for eight weeks“(human immunodeficiency virus which destroys the immune defences), said a spokesman for Unitaid in Geneva, Hervé Verhoosel.
He explained that this program will reach a very specific audience: “adolescent girls and young women in South Africa, since today they are the first to be affected by HIV, and transgender people or men who have sex with men in Brazil, who are also very vulnerable sections of the population affected by HIV“.
Approved by USA and England
In a statement, Unitaid explains that this injectable version of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) – also called long-acting cabotegravir – is the latest innovation in HIV prevention.
“The United States and England have just approved this system“, but it’s not available there yet,” Verhoosel said.
This treatment is 70 to 90% more effective than daily oral PrEP in reducing the risk of HIV infection and requires only six injections per year, according to the organization, which raises funds once morest the diseases.
It also helps to alleviate fears that the pills might be confused with HIV treatment, which would put the person at risk of stigmatization.
Call to make treatment available to all
Unitaid, in partnership with Fiocruz in Brazil and Wits RHI in South Africa, as well as local health authorities in both countries, will integrate long-acting PrEP into national sexual health programs.
The first doses were given by pharmaceutical companies, Verhoosel said. Unitaid calls on laboratories to apply for low and moderate income countries a price adapted to the economy and the needs of the country, and in the longer term to allow voluntary licenses to manufacture generics.
Today, one million people have access to PrEP worldwide, well below the target set by the United Nations.
On July 16, 2012, a first preventive treatment called PrEP, the antiretroviral cocktail Truvada, was authorized in the United States. Since then, this type of treatment has proven its effectiveness and allowed people at risk to protect themselves by taking a tablet as a preventive measure.
