Loreen Willenberg, 66, is only the third patient ever to recover from HIV, but the first without drugs or surgery. Researchers say her body ‘locked away’ the virus in her genome.

In South Africa, the country hit hardest hit by the HIV epidemic, behavioral factors are a major reason why HIV services are not widely used and are ultimately the leading barriers to ending the HIV epidemic.

The arrival in 2012 of a daily pill to prevent HIV infection was widely hailed as a breakthrough that could drive new infections worldwide to very low levels. Eight years later, it is having a strong impact in some places and little or none in others.

ABIA expresses its total rejection of the unfortunate declaration of the President of the Republic, Jair Bolsonaro, who in an attempt to justify the unjustifiable – the sexual abstinence policy recently announced by Minister Damares Alves -stated that “a person with HIV is an expense for everyone here in Brazil ”.

Improved implementation of TB and HIV care cascade would reduce human suffering and untimely deaths

The original patents for many anti-HIV medications have expired and generic versions of them are available. This means that different versions of the same anti-HIV drug are produced by different manufacturers.

Gaps in public financing for health can be met by eliminating tax dodging and implementing progressive taxation; health and development must be protected from the growing impact of debt

A recent proposal by the Brazilian government to effectively privatize its patent office has alarmed patient advocates, who fear such a move would make it easier for the pharmaceutical industry to maintain monopolies on medicines and, consequently, higher prices in one of the world’s largest economies.

South Africa’s HIV epidemic is very different today from what it was in the early 2000s. The most obvious change is that due to the provision of antiretroviral treatment people with HIV are living longer. Let’s be clear, far too many people still die of HIV-related causes (around 68 000 in 2019), but the time of multiple funerals every weekend of people who died of AIDS is over and life-expectancy has recovered from a low of 53 in 2004 to over 66 today.

But the president’s recent funding cuts to civil society organizations threaten to imperil their progress