![]() ![]() “The hurdles involve formulations of antiretrovirals for children that are harder to take (e.g. You have to be able to maintain these people in a treatment circumstance, really lifelong.” “This is not like treating a urinary tract infection where you’re finished in three days. “These are not one-shot deals, right?” he noted. While medicines are more affordable and in many ways easier to take than they have been before, they still require a methodical, consistent application to broader populations, Schaffner said. ![]() As per the UNAIDS July 2023 report, 77% of adults have access to life-saving ART whereas only 57% of children have access to the needed treatment.” “However, fewer children have access to antiretroviral therapy than adults. “We do have good HIV treatments now for children and adults both, mainly with a medication called dolutegravir combined with two other antiretroviral treatments,” Gandhi said. Coverage was 77% among adults (15 years and older) but only 57% among children (0–14 years). The report noted that nearly half of the 1.5 million children living with HIV were still not getting antiretroviral treatment. The UNICEF report states that in 2022, “four in 10 infants with HIV missed out on a timely diagnosis.” Because we have combination therapies that work very well… you don’t have to take a whole handful of pills several times a day anymore,” he said.Įven with the medical advances, access to combination therapies is still a major obstacle, especially for children. “It’s much easier to treat people with HIV infection because you can frequently do it in using very few actual pills. Schaffner says that significant advances in medicine have made implementing combination treatments less onerous for people living with HIV. What are current and future treatments for HIV in these age groups? They’re infected, they pass their infection on to these women, and then we run into the difficulty that they are not tested and treated as comprehensively as men are.” “The second thing is that men often take advantage of women. “Women across the world are less valued than men, so testing and treatment simply is not as available to them as it is to men,” Schaffner told Healthline. ![]() William Schaffner, a professor of preventive medicine in the Department of Health Policy and a professor of medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Tennessee. Early sexual debut was associated with lower education, marriage, ever witnessing parental intimate partner violence during childhood, risky sexual behaviors, poor mental health, and less HIV testing.”Ī traditionally skewed patriarchal dynamic is also to blame, according to Dr. The CDC report states that forced sexual initiation is “associated with being unmarried, violence victimization, risky sexual behaviors, sexually transmitted infections (STIs), and poor mental health. Most young women’s risk factors for HIV infection are not their own risk factors but those of their partners.” “Moreover, with millions of girls out of school in the last three years due to the COVID-19 pandemic response, economic conditions were even worse for many in sub-Saharan Africa and this economic need for young women to sell sex likely heightened. “This disparity is likely due to the increased vulnerability of adolescent girls/young women to forced sex (14.7% to 38.9% of sexual debut is forced as evaluated by this CDC report in seven sub-Saharan African countries) and economic circumstances that may lead to young women selling sex for money or food,” Gandhi said. Monica Gandhi, a professor of medicine and the associate division chief of the Division of HIV, Infectious Diseases, and Global Medicine at UCSF/San Francisco General Hospital, told Healthline that a combination of cultural and economic factors contribute to the higher numbers of female HIV cases. Here, the population of young women is disproportionately at risk.ĭr. Why are young women are more susceptible to HIV infectionĪccording to the UNICEF report, 384 females between the ages of 10 and 19 test positive for HIV every day across the globe.Īpproximately 87% of HIV-positive children between the ages of 0 and 14 and 82% of HIV-positive adolescents aged 10 to 19 live in sub-Saharan Africa. ![]()
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