Antiretroviral drugs and therapy (ART)

The Good Practice Guide analyses each of the public health flexibilities in the TRIPS Agreement and provides examples where and how have they been used by national governments.

The goals of this study were to document ART efforts in a resource-limited setting with high prevalence of IDUs, to identify high-risk groups for failure who may benefit from more frequent monitoring or other interventions and to assess the potential for delayed diagnosis of treatment failure when using targeted testing based on clinical and immunologic criteria.

This Regional Issues Brief has been written to provide an overview of an area of enquiry that the Global Commission on HIV and the Law is examining – issues of laws pertaining to intellectual property rights and access to medicines.

If HIV treatment and prevention interventions are ambitiously expanded, according to UNAIDS, twelve million infections and more than seven million deaths can be averted by 2020. The number of new infections could be reduced by more than half by 2015.

ART first became available in PNG in 2004 and the PNG National Department of Health recently estimated that more than 70% of people requiring treatment were receiving it in 2009.

In June 2010, the UNAIDS Secretariat and WHO launched Treatment 2.0, an initiative designed to achieve and sustain universal access and maximize the preventive benefits of antiretroviral therapy (ART).

The meeting’s objective was to refine the recommendations of the Conference on Anti-Retroviral Drug Optimization (CADO) held in June, 2010, and the recommendations made by the Medicines Patent Pool, UNITAID and WHO, endorsed by a number of global partners working on the Treatment 2.0 initiative, to the WHO Expert Committee on Essential Medicines in March, 2011.

The goal of potent and durable viral suppression is paramount whether the treatment is the initial or subsequent regimen. A failing regimen requires replacement with at least two, or preferably three new drugs without cross resistance to achieve viral suppression. To this end, testing for resistance is useful.

This programmatic update is meant to provide a current perspective for countries on the important changes and new considerations arising since publication of WHO’s PMTCT ARV guidelines, 2010 version, especially as a number of countries are now preparing to adopt Option B+.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has introduced the concept of HIV elimination through the use of combination prevention and prevention of mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT) of HIV. Additionally, WHO and the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) launched Treatment 2.0 to look at ways to provide better services to a larger number of persons at lesser cost, and in a way that helps to retain them on lifelong ART.