Attrition

Over the last three decades, a range of biomedical and behavioral approaches have dramatically reduced HIV incidence throughout the world and improved the quality and availability of life-saving treatment for those living with HIV.

This year, 2018, will be the year that a really significant number of people in Africa started HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), the 22nd International AIDS Conference (AIDS 2018) in Amsterdam heard last week.

Background: The recent scale-up of prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV (PMTCT) services has rapidly accelerated antiretroviral therapy (ART) uptake among pregnant and postpartum women in sub-Saharan Africa.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) present a groundbreaking global development agenda to protect the most vulnerable.

Injectable contraceptives are popular in sub-Saharan Africa but have high discontinuation rates due partly to the need for provider-administered re-injection.

Although several studies have explored factors associated with loss to follow-up (LTFU) from HIV care, there remains a gap in understanding how these factors vary by setting, volume of patient and patients’ demographic and clinical characteristics.

Communities in South Africa’s informal settlements consist of ad-hoc and improvised housing whose residents seek opportunities for employment in the surrounding area.

Retention of patients in HIV care is crucial to ensure timely treatment initiation, viral suppression, and to avert AIDS-related deaths. We did a randomised trial to determine whether a text-messaging intervention improved retention during the first year of HIV care.