UN strategy for eliminating HIV in Sub-Saharan Africa is unfeasible, study finds
he World Health Organization and UNAIDS have proposed using " treatment as prevention" to eliminate HIV in sub-Saharan Africa. The strategy would treat people infected with HIV to reduce their ability to infect others as a way to prevent them from transmitting the infection. UNAIDS has set goals to diagnose 90 percent of HIV-infected people and to treat 90 percent of those diagnosed individuals by 2020. But a new study by UCLA researchers concludes that although the plan sounds laudable, implementing it might not be feasible. The authors used statistical mapping techniques to identify the location of all people who are HIV-infected in Lesotho, a landlocked country within South Africa in which about 1 in 4 adults is infected with the virus. Currently, many of these people have not been diagnosed with HIV and are not receiving treatment. The researchers used their map to design and evaluate HIV elimination strategies. They found that the strategy proposed by the WHO and ...