By Nina Hasen, Director of HIV and Tuberculosis, PSI
As we mark World AIDS Day, I’m reviewing the seismic progress in the HIV landscape over the last 10 years:
- Enormous growth of treatment
- Continuing reductions in mother-to-child transmission of the virus
- Drops in incidence across the globe.
In 2005, HIV was a death sentence for most people in the developing world. Now in 2015, it is a manageable chronic disease. There is much to celebrate.
But these achievements have not eliminated the challenges of HIV. Across the world, we still see persistent new infections, still struggle to find people infected with HIV and still fail to ensure them reliable access to treatment.
Why the difficulties?
In many ways, we continue to respond as if it were 2005.
- Our prevention, testing and care services still function on the assumption that HIV is a death sentence, with messages that don’t reflect the reality of today.
- Most people still don’t know their real risks for contracting HIV, and most still believe that treatment is only for people who are sick.
- In many countries, we still assume that the only way to reach scale with interventions is to provide free services through the public sector, even as the use of private sector health care grows.
If we are to capitalize on the great scientific gains made in preventing, diagnosing and treating HIV, we need to press the reset button on all these assumptions. Here are just a few ways that PSI will be doing that in 2016, as we look to increase our impact:
- Revamping our HIV testing programs based on data about those populations we want to find. We want to understand what motivates people who are most likely to be positive to seek testing, and what kind of testing services they prefer.
- Exploring HIV treatment as a market, not just a public health intervention. What are the successes and failures of this market? What is a vision for a healthy market? And how can PSI contribute to that vision in each of the countries where we work?
- Using the power of social marketing and social franchising to extend HIV products and services, especially pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). PSI has led the world in making condoms available to people who most need them. How can we extend these lessons to PrEP to make this, and other new technologies, available where they are needed and can have impact?
As we look forward to 2016, we hope you’ll join us in looking for ways to press the reset button on your assumptions, too. Let’s all make 2016 a “think outside the box” year. If we do it well, we’ll look back and see a turning point in bringing this vicious and destructive epidemic to its knees.
