Promoting long term adherence to antiretroviral treatment

While funders start to backtrack on financial commitments to tackling the AIDS epidemic,1 the HIV research community is rallying because important steps are currently being taken in treatment, prevention, and the combination of the two.2 Not since antiretroviral treatment first became available have expectations been so high that its widespread use can break the back of the global AIDS pandemic. Research into an HIV vaccination has been funded for more than a decade, but long term antiretroviral treatment is still the most effective biomedical prevention tool available.2

For antiretroviral treatment to work as a preventive measure, however, patients must consistently adhere to treatment, yet our understanding of how to achieve widespread optimal adherence is still limited. Most people who take antiretroviral drugs reside in Africa—currently, more people in the small country of Zambia (283<thin>000) are taking these drugs than in the whole of the United States (268<thin>000).3 Although most patients in Africa adhere extremely well to treatment,4 a proportion of patients do not. It is important that …