A patient with AIDS at a community hospital in the Central African Republic. Sub-Saharan Africa has high rates of HIV infection -- and was the location for a trial testing the effectiveness of a new strategy for preventing infection.
In this double-blind, randomized study of 5,300 cisgender women in South Africa and Uganda, 2,134 got the injection and the others took one of two types of daily PrEP pills. The trial began on August 2021 and, so far, not a single woman who received the injections has contracted HIV. The participants who received either of the oral PrEP options, Truvada and Descovy, had infection rates of about 2% — consistent with the infection rates of oral PrEP in other clinical trials.
The study’s focus on women in sub-Saharan Africa is based on HIV data. Despite accounting for 10% of the world’s population, sub-Saharan Africans comprise two-thirds of people living with HIV –, an assistant professor of medicine and infectious disease expert at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. “It’s hard to take a medication every single day. A medication that is every 6 months has a lot of potential.