The six-monthly anti-HIV jab, which prevents HIV through sex, is now stocked for free at 360 government clinics in six of South Africa’s provinces. How does the jab work, how do you know if you need it and where can you find it? We’ve got you covered with answers to 13 questions
The uptake of the once-every-six-month HIV prevention jab lenacapavir (LEN) in South Africa will be heavily affected by the Trump administration’s funding cuts to the country, a new report has found. Researchers conducted in-depth interviews with doctors, nurses, peer counsellors, transgender and young people, sex workers, gay and bisexual men and government health workers with personal experience of the funding cuts in Cape Town and Johannesburg
Experts say South Africa’s contradictory approach to drugs — treating addiction as both a disease and a crime — is fuelling a worsening crisis in places like Westbury, where illicit drugs plague the community
SA’s first consignment of the twice-a-year anti-HIV injection, lenacapavir — 37 920 doses — arrived last week at OR Tambo Airport via two shipments from Dublin. The batches reached the country six weeks later than expected. The delay of the shipment meant the health department couldn’t start its roll-out on April 1, as it had originally planned, and had to postpone it to mid to late May
Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi has met the South African Medical Association — one of the organisations taking him to court about the National Health Insurance Act — to talk about “things we have in common”. President Cyril Ramaphosa is planning to meet Business Unity South Africa again after an initial meeting in 2024, during which they discussed alternatives to the NHI
South Africa’s National Aids Council, Sanac, has asked local drug companies to submit applications by April 7 to make generic versions of an anti-HIV jab that could end Aids by 2043 in the country. The original version of the once-every-six-months shot, known as lenacapavir, is produced by the US pharmaceutical company, Gilead Sciences. Sanac will submit a shortlist of successful applicants, who met the requirements of the Council’s expression of interest call, to Gilead by July.
At 33, the retired Constitutional Court justice thought he had, maybe, seven years left. His story traces the arc from certain death because of Aids to a chronic, manageable condition at 73. He asks what happens when the generation who fought for life finally get to grow old
A review of 37 studies found that when people stop taking weight-loss drugs like Ozempic, the weight comes back
After a year of US funding cuts across global public health, including South Africa’s hard-hit HIV programmes, new realities are settling in
For some teenagers, emotional pain manifests as deliberately cutting, burning, hitting, biting, scratching or picking at their skin