Online Reporter
Adherence to HIV and Aids treatment is, in many instances, a life and death matter.
Default and be ready for serious, multiple health consequences, including viral rebound, an increase in opportunistic infections, drug resistance and possible loss of life.
Adhere, and you are safer from the foregoing adversities.
Yet adherence is genuinely difficult for some people. They have to take their medication at a specific time, daily, for the rest of their life. If one’s time is 8PM, it has to be 8PM daily for 365 days and at least 365 tablets a year. That is a mountain of tablets; quite imprisoning.
As a result, and for various reasons, some HIV-infected individuals defaulted, ending up suffering from the serious complications we cited earlier.
Indeed, achieving adherence through existing treatment regimens was one huge weak point in the world’s and Zimbabwe’s response to HIV and Aids.
There had to be a way to address that life-threatening handicap.
That way opened in Bulawayo yesterday when the Government launched Lenacapavir, a long-acting injectable pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) that is administered just twice a year to reduce the risk of someone contracting HIV.
It is incredible if we consider the heap of tablets some among us had to take every 8PM daily all their lives. With Lenacapavir, one can get their one jab on January 1 and the second on June 1, the same year. They are done and live healthily.
At this initial stage, the rollout is targeting the cohort, which is at a higher risk of HIV infection — adolescent girls and young women, sex workers and their clients, and pregnant and breastfeeding women in high-incidence settings.
“When clients see pills, they start asking questions,” we cite a sex worker as saying elsewhere in this edition.
“Some assume you are HIV positive, or have other health conditions. This injection is private. No one has to know, and I feel empowered and can take better charge of my health. It is much more empowering for me as I can render maximum services to my clients and ensure maximum pleasure and satisfaction without having to worry about taking oral PrEP daily. It helps me manage my work and the risks that come with it better.”
If administered to the book, Lenacapavir looks set to be revolutionary indeed as our country moves to bring HIV and Aids under more assured control and possibly eliminate this formerly deadly condition over the next few years.
We urge the Government and its partners to quickly onboard all the citizens, who are at the highest risk of contracting HIV and expand the coverage to all others who might find Lenacapavir useful.
However, as we celebrate this milestone, let’s keep in mind that this drug is not a silver bullet, for silver bullets don’t exist.
The proven safeguards remain relevant and must be used alongside Lenacapavir — abstinence, being faithful to one equally faithful partner, consistent and correct use of the condom, delayed sexual debut and regular testing.
