How did Botswana reduce the rates of HIV in Botswana?
The National AIDS Coordinating Agency created a treatment plan to offer universal free antiretroviral treatment (ART), making Botswana the first country in the Southern African region to do so. This effectively reduced the rates of HIV in Botswana.
How effective is sex education in Botswana?
Botswana’s sex education program holds ideas such as faithfulness and cultural traditions as the basis of its programs. Without comprehensive and adequate sex education, Botswana’s HIV rates remain high even though treatment is easily accessible.
Is Botswana ready to take on its ambitious art program?
When the government decided to make ART widely available as a central component of the strategy, Merck agreed to donate the drugs free of charge. And in 2002, Botswana was ready to take on its ambitious program.
Is Botswana the country hit hardest by HIV?
It was not unusual to encounter gravely ill men and women, bone thin, trudging for miles to commemorate the lives of their loved ones. Botswana was one of the countries hit hardest by HIV. In 2001 alone, an estimated 320,000 people in Botswana were living with HIV—slightly more than one in four.
How many people are receiving antiretroviral therapy?
HIV Treatment Access—As of June 2020, 28.2 million people with HIV (75%) were accessing antiretroviral therapy (ART) globally.
How many people are on ARV treatment in South Africa?
Antiretroviral coverage of people with HIV in South Africa has increased from 0% in 2000 to 71% in 2019. The South African antiretroviral programme is now the largest in the world, with more than five million people on treatment, and increasing.
What is the newest antiretroviral drug in Botswana?
The Botswana government has recently introduced Dolutegravir to be used as the first line “backbone” anti-retroviral drug in the treatment of HIV infection in a national HIV treatment programme.
How many antiretroviral drugs are there?
The use of HIV medicines to treat HIV infection is called antiretroviral therapy (ART). People on ART take a combination of HIV medicines (called an HIV treatment regimen) every day. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved more than 30 HIV medicines to treat HIV infection.
How many adults are in South Africa?
60,14 million peopleFor 2021, Statistics South Africa (Stats SA) estimates the mid-year population at 60,14 million people. Approximately 51,1% (about 30,75 million) of the population is female and approximately 48,9% (about 29,39 million) is male.
Are Arvs free in Botswana?
The government provides ARV treatment and HIV related laboratory testing free of charge for all.
Which are the 5 antiretroviral drugs?
Currently, there are eight FDA-approved NRTIs: abacavir (ABC, Ziagen), didanosine (ddI, Videx), emtricitabine (FTC, Emtriva), lamivudine (3TC, Epivir), stavudine (d4T, Zerit), zalcitabine (ddC, Hivid), zidovudine (AZT, Retrovir), and Tenofovir disoprovil fumarate (TDF, Viread), a nucleotide RT inhibitor (Fig.
What are the 6 classes of antiretroviral drugs?
Classes of antiretroviral agents include the following:Nucleoside or nucleotide reverse transcriptase inhibitors (NRTIs)Protease inhibitors (PIs)Nonnucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors (NNRTIs)Fusion inhibitors.CCR5 co-receptor antagonists (entry inhibitors)HIV integrase strand transfer inhibitors.
What does ARVs stand for?
Antiretroviral treatment (ART) means taking antiretroviral drugs (also called antiretrovirals or ARVs) to keep HIV at very low levels in your body.
Who is the African Comprehensive HIV/AIDS Partnership?
As life-saving drugs rose up the agenda, government officials embarked on a collaboration with Merck, the Merck Foundation, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and formed the African Comprehensive HIV/AIDS Partnership (ACHAP).
How much did the government spend on HIV/AIDS in 2012?
By 2012, total annual spending on HIV/AIDS had reached US$347 million in Botswana, of which 68 percent was covered by the government—a remarkable sum for a sub-Saharan country, but a challenge for the government to sustain. [13]#N#NACA (National AIDS Coordinating Agency, Republic of Botswana). 2014. Botswana 2013 Global Aids Report: Progress Report of the National Response to the 2011 Declaration of Commitments on HIV and AIDS. Gaborone, Botswana: NACA. http://www.unaids.org/sites/default/files/country/documents/file,94425,es..pdf..#N#The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation contributed US$50 million and the Merck Foundation US$56.6 million to get Masa up and running; each contributed another US$30 million in 2010. The remainder came from international sources, including the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.
What is Masa in Botswana?
And in 2002, Botswana was ready to take on its ambitious program. The government christened its new HIV program Masa, meaning "New Dawn" in Setswana, in four urban centers around the country: Gaborone, Francistown, Maun, and Serowe.
Why did Masa choose to prioritize training?
Masa chose to prioritize training because ART was new to most health workers. The Ministry of Health, ACHAP, and international partners jointly recruited and trained local and foreign clinical HIV/AIDS experts, as well as experts from the Harvard AIDS Institute, to introduce ART and patient management.
What happened in 2000 in Batswana?
In 2000, many Batswana marked each Saturday with dour ritual: funerals for their latest friends or family members who died of AIDS. The staggering losses decimated communities, debilitating adults in the midst of their productive years and leaving millions of children orphaned.
How many times more likely are women to get HIV than men?
Girls and women between the ages of 15 and 24 were three times more likely than men to be infected with HIV HIV by Gender HIV infection risk by gender 3:1. The government's firm commitment to addressing the urgent situation inspired help from philanthropists and businesses.
Which country was the hardest hit by HIV?
Botswana was one of the countries hit hardest by HIV. In 2001 alone, an estimated 320,000 people in Botswana were living with HIV—slightly more than one in four. Girls and young women bore disproportionate risk. By 2004, they were three times as likely to test HIV positive as their male counterparts.
Is anti-retroviral therapy a cure?
However, ART is not a cure and it must be taken every day for the rest of these patients’ lives. As ART is becoming increasingly available and affordable to eligible people in developing countries, more attention is focused on issues related to its rational use, as well as to ART adherence, which is a key element for reducing the spread of drug-resistant HIV (Steel et al. 2007).
Does Botswana have ART?
Since 2002, the government of Botswana has provided ART free of charge to all citizens of Botswana who qualify for treatment. The ART programme aims to suppress viral replication, restore the person’s immune response, stop or at least delay the progression of the disease, reduce mortality and enhance the person’s quality of life. However, there are concerns that the ART adherence levels might be suboptimal (below 95%), with potentially serious consequences (World Health Organization [WHO] 2006), including the development of HIV strains that are resistant to first-line antiretroviral drugs (ARVs). Second- and third-line ART regimens, which must be used in cases of ARV-resistant strains of HIV, are much more expensive than the first-line ARVs and are more likely to produce side-effects. According to the WHO (2005:2), ART adherence rates of at least 95% are required for optimal viral suppression and treatment success.
Abstract
Countries in sub-Saharan Africa are under significant pressure to open large-scale, public antiretroviral treatment clinics. Many lessons have been learned in Botswana, where the first public antiretroviral treatment clinic in Africa was established.
Acknowledgments
We thank Molly Pretorius Holme and Katie Holland (Harvard School of Public Health AIDS Initiative, Boston, MA), as well as Phillip Rotz (Botswana-Harvard School of Public Health AIDS Initiative Partnership for HIV Research and Education, Gaborone, Botswana), for their critical review of and contribution to this report.