Projects

Background: Retention in care and treatment adherence are key challenges to national antiretroviral therapy (ART) programmes in Sub-Saharan Africa. Innovative community-based approaches to HIV care and treatment have been proposed and implemented in several Sub- Saharan African countries to improve retention in care and adherence rates of patients on ART. One of such innovations, the „ART adherence club‟ was developed and piloted in the Western ...

Background: Although the initial outcomes of the South African public antiretroviral treatment (ART) programme are promising, there are still important challenges to be met to successfully fight the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the long term, namely (1) HIV/AIDS care as chronic disease care requires psychosocial care on top of biomedical care to ensure long-term adherence and patient retention and (2) HIV incidence levels need to drop by positively ...

The HIV/AIDS epidemic is still severely impacting South Africa: in 2021, approximately 1 out of 5 adult South Africans was HIV positive. As a response, the South African government has rolled out life-saving antiretroviral treatment (ART) in the public health sector, with approximately 5.5 million people currently receiving ART. ART has been proven to be highly effective: when achieving 95% adherence, HIV is transitioned from a terminal illness ...

The general research aim is to undertake a sociological study of the impact of HIV/AIDS and the associated ART on the lives of those affected and more specifically on the identity reconstruction of HIV/AIDS patients receiving ART in sub-Saharan Africa. This research views ART not only as the turning point in the treatment of an 'ill body', detached from the social reality, but also as a turning point in the experience of AIDS as a chronic ...

Antiretroviral treatment has transformed AIDS from an acute, degenerative disease into a chronic - albeit incurable - illness. Hence, the illness is not an external assault on the body, but an internal one, becoming part of the patient's identity as a 'chronic HIV/AIDS patient'. This research project aims to assess the mechanisms through which the illness and the associated treatment influence the lives and the identity of the patients.

To gain a more profound understanding of the intrinsic dynamics (why) and processes (how) by which social factors positively or negatively affect the creation of the new identity as a chronic HIV/AIDS patient on ART, additional qualitative data is needed. The general aim is therefore to undertake a qualitative sociological study ¿ interviewing 120 HIV/AIDS patients on ART in the Free State Province of South Africa ¿ of this transition to life as ...

In secondary controllers, HAART and the immune system have induced viral mutations in Gag, Pol and Env, which have resulted in lowered viral fitness and immune protection. Some mutations have generated neoepitopes, which have induced cross-reacting and polyfunctional T cell responses against Gag-Pol and broad cross-neutralizing antibodies against Env. This type of immune responses and the associated normalizations of pathological ...

Introducing antiretroviral therapy (ART) has averted 2.5 million deaths in low- and middle-income countries globally since 1995. Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for the vast majority of the averted deaths: about 1.8 million. More than 8 million people had access to antiretroviral therapy in 2011 in low and middle-income countries which indicate 20% increase from 2010. In Ethiopia the cumulative number of patients who have ever started treatment ...