ScienceInsider: Swaziland makes major strides against its AIDS epidemic
“New data from Swaziland, a tiny country in southern Africa, provide some of the most convincing evidence yet that aggressively ramping up treatment for HIV/AIDS works on a population level to cut the rate of new infections. The kingdom has had one of the worst HIV/AIDS epidemics in the world, but since 2011, its massive scale-up of testing and treatment has slashed the rate of new infections by 44 percent. … Today, 171,266 HIV-infected people in Swaziland receive ARVs, thanks to support from the U.S. government President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief program (PEPFAR), and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. A seven-month survey, funded by the Washington, D.C.-based PEPFAR and completed in March, found that 73.1 percent of the infected population now has fully suppressed virus…” (Cohen, 7/24).