We are proud to share that Prof. Alison Buttenheim’s paper titled: “Fight Like a Nerdy Girl: The Dear Pandemic Playbook for Combating Health Misinformation.” was selected for the 2022 American Journal of Health Promotion’s Editor in Chief Award.

Our team from Indlela in collaboration with DGMT and Genesis Analytics published a paper in BMJ Global Health entitled Quasi-experimental evaluation of a financial incentive for first-dose COVID-19 vaccination among adults aged ≥60 years in South Africa. The manuscript assesses the short-term association between the Vooma Voucher (an NDoH intervention) incentive program and first-dose vaccination rates among those aged ≥60 years. The headline result is that the incentive program led to an increase of 7.15%–12.01% in daily first-dose vaccinations among older adults in South Africa. 

Dr. Jacqui Miot, Dr. Lawrence Long and Dr. Sydney Rosen published an article in BMC Health Services Research entitled Similar costs and outcomes for differentiated service delivery models for HIV treatment in Uganda. Differentiated service delivery (DSD) for antiretroviral therapy (ART) has been recommended by the World Health Organisation to increase access to and retention of ART treatment. This has led to its rapid scale up across sub-Saharan Africa, in many countries, including Uganda. This paper measured costs and outcomes of differentiated models of care in Uganda and compared these to the Standard of Care. Costs of differentiated models of care were similar to SOC and the models achieved excellent outcomes (retention in care and viral suppression). 

Dr. Lawrence Long and colleagues published a paper on The early-stage comprehensive costs of routine PrEP implementation and scale-up in Zambia in PLOS Global Public Health. Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) implementation costs extend beyond the direct delivery costs to include essential demand creation and client support costs to enhance PrEP initiation and persistence. The paper estimates the cost of providing PrEP in Zambia through five different PrEP delivery models by calculating  the annual cost of providing PrEP per client. Despite the integration of PrEP delivery into full service delivery models, reaching vulnerable and marginalised populations at substantial risk of HIV infection is likely to cost more as a result of greater programmatic costs involved in community mobilisation and client support. This is important when developing programs to reach these populations that carry a disproportionate burden.

Harsha Thirumurthy and colleagues from UCSF, UC Berkeley, and the Kenya Medical Research Institute published results from a study that used a sequential multiple assignment randomized trial (SMART) design of behavioural interventions to promote retention in HIV care in NEJM Evidence. The SMART design tested text messages and small conditional cash transfers initially since they are relatively low-cost interventions. Participants with treatment lapses were then re-randomized to a control group, to both text messages and conditional cash transfers, or to peer navigation. The active interventions to prevent retention lapses followed by navigation for those who did lapse, and maintenance of initial interventions for those without lapses resulted in best overall retention and viral suppression among the strategies studied. Here is a link to the study on Adaptive Strategies for Retention in Care among Persons Living with HIV. 

In this study protocol entitled A randomised trial of the effectiveness of the Common Elements Treatment Approach (CETA) for improving HIV treatment outcomes among women experiencing intimate partner violence in South Africa, Dr. Sophie Pascoe and colleagues will be randomising women living with HIV with unsuppressed viral loads, who are also at risk for poor adherence to treatment and have experienced intimate partner violence (IPV), to receive either a CETA cognitive behavioural intervention or an active attention control using text message safety checks and appointment reminders. There is no pure control group due to ethical considerations with regards to high levels of IPV amongst the study population. Look out for more information and results from this study over the coming year! More details from this study will be presented at the SA Mental Health Conference. 

In this webinar by Global HIV Vaccine Enterprise IAS and IAVI entitled: Engaging adolescent girls and young women in HIV prevention research, Indlela’s External Advisory Board member Prof. Linda-Gail Bekker and Director at the Desmond Tutu Health Foundation spoke about involving AGYW in HIV prevention research. She touched on topics such as population diversity and consequences of excluding some populations in clinical research, exclusion of AGYW in clinical research, how these groups are more exposed to HIV, sexually transmitted infections and pregnancy in sub Saharan Africa, and involvement of young people in PrEP studies. (est viewing time 63 min).

The Mosaico study team presented updates on recent study developments relating to the investigation on the experimental vaccine regimen aimed at preventing HIV infection in North America, Latin America and Europe. A Phase 3 study of an investigational HIV vaccine regimen was discontinued following a planned, interim review by the study’s independent Data and Safety Monitoring Board. The vaccine generally had no safety concerns; however, it was not effective at preventing the acquisition of HIV-1 (est viewing time 62 min).