HIV, Hope for HIV-positive People from Long-Term Therapy

There is hope for the over 26 thousand HIV positive patients confirmed in the last ten years in the area of ​​Milan, since it makes the Lombard capital the city with more cases in Italy. The specialists affiliated with the University Bicocca and Niguarda Hospital, long-term therapy (long-acting), based on cabotegravir and rilpivirine, which provides one injection every two months, has been tested in people with HIV with viral load still detectable due to poor adherence to daily oral therapy. Even in this context difficult, over 75% of participants achieved the viral suppression, demonstrating that the therapy can be a valid option even for the most fragile or discontinuous patients in the treatment. It is one of the topics that emerged during the Icar (Italian Conference on Aids and Antiviral Research) in Padua, with over 1,200 clinicians, researchers, nurses and volunteers. A second important frontier is that of the emergence of the submerged: there are at least 9,000 people unknowingly positive to the HIV test, which they do not undergo for a series of reasons social stigmas that are still hard to remove. "People who face greater barriers to access tests, such as migrants and those living in fragile conditions social are the people we need to work on - he explained in his report Paolo Meli, Emmaus Community Association and Ftc Bergamo referent -. The other lever is viral suppression: 25 thousand people have an active infection, most of them because they struggle to take care of themselves on a continuous basis or because, precisely, they don't diagnosed. Put these people into treatment and support adherence to therapy would maximize the effect 'treatment as prevention': not only would health benefit personal, but the entire community towards the elimination of transmission". The conference will conclude on Friday under the presidency of Annamaria Cattelan, director of the Infectious Diseases Unit at AOU Padova. And during the three days of the conference, in collaboration with the Carlo Foresta Foundation and the Italian Red Cross in the area university, the spaces of the Il Naviglio exhibition host a mobile clinic for screening among the youngest, statistically the segment of the population most sensitive to Prevention of sexually transmitted diseases: goal that of carrying out in the three evenings, to which will be added a fourth on May 28, at least 2,000 rapid tests.