The best strategy to defeat HIV in South Africa
UCLA study challenges World Health Organisation's approach. The World Health Organisation is about to roll out a new strategy for AIDS prevention in South Africa, a country where more than 5 million people are infected with HIV. Based on a mathematical model, the WHO predicts this strategy will completely eliminate HIV in South Africa within a decade, writes UCLA's Mark Wheeler.
But not so fast, suggests a group of UCLA researchers. Their work challenges the proposed strategy by showing it could lead to several million individuals developing drug-resistant strains of HIV. Furthermore, they say, it will cost billions of dollars more than the WHO has estimated.
Reporting in the current issue of the journal PLOS ONE, senior author Sally Blower, director of the UCLA Centre for Biomedical Modelling, and first author Bradley Wagner, a postdoctoral scholar in Blower's lab, used sophisticated computer modelling to evaluate the WHO's proposed strategy. Read the article here