Brazil will receive funding from Unitaid, a global agency linked to the World Health Organization (WHO), to start an injectable treatment for HIV prevention in the country. Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEp) uses the long-acting drug cabotegravir and consists of six applications per year, which has been shown to be more effective than daily oral treatment.
The implementation will take place in a partnership between the agency and the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz), and the project will be coordinated by the Evandro Chagas National Institute of Infectious Diseases (INI/Fiocruz) and the Ministry of Health. The coordinator will be the head of the STD and AIDS Clinical Research Laboratory at INI, Beatriz Grinsztejn, an infectious disease specialist who recently became the first woman in Latin America to chair the largest association of professionals and researchers dedicated to HIV/AIDS, the International AIDS Society. .
The partnership was announced yesterday (18) at the joint seminar Brazil and Unitaid – current partnerships and future perspectives, in the auditorium of the Institute of Technology in Immunobiologicals (Bio-Manguinhos/Fiocruz). The minister of Health, Marcelo Queiroga, and the president of Fiocruz, Nísia Trindade Lima, participated in the seminar. According to Fiocruz de Notícias, Queiroga stressed that “thanks to Unitaid’s investments, communities in Brazil with disproportionately high rates of HIV will be among the first in the world to benefit from this new preventive treatment.” Nísia said that the US$ 10 million that will be invested will have a strong impact on Brazil and South Africa.
Long-acting cabotegravir provides eight weeks of continuous protection against virus infection through a single intramuscular injection. According to Fundação Oswaldo Cruz, the project will target the groups most vulnerable to HIV infection: men who have sex with men and transgender women, aged between 18 and 30.
In addition to Brazil, Unitaid also selected South Africa to implement the project, which will be made available to teenagers and young women. According to Fiocruz, in sub-Saharan Africa, six out of seven new cases of infection in adolescents occur in girls, and young women have twice the contamination rate compared to young men.
The two countries will adopt the treatment in an integrated way to their national health programs, and the data generated should serve as support for the global implementation of the program. The United Nations target is to make prevention reach 95% of people at risk of infection by 2025.
Fiocruz explains that injectable PrEP, in addition to facilitating treatment, helps to mitigate the fear that the pills will be interpreted as HIV treatment and cause the user to suffer stigma, discrimination or intimate partner violence as a result.
