Graeme Meintjes & colleagues show HIV related admissions in SA hospitals remain very common despite ARV scale-up

Professor Graeme Meintjes and colleagues recently published a paper of public interest entitled "HIV-related medical admissions to a South African district hospital remain frequent despite effective antiretroviral therapy scale-up". Professor Meintjes is based in the Clinical Infectious Diseases Research Initiative (CIDRI), IDM and the Department of Medicine, UCT..

South Africa has the largest human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) epidemic in the world with an estimated 6.4 million people living with HIV infection. The public sector antiretroviral (ART) programme was launched in 2004.  Over the past decade there has been an unprecedented scale-up of the programme with more than 2.6 million people having initiated ART. Little however is known about the impact of the ART programme on adult HIV-related hospitalizations and outcomes at the level of public sector hospitals in South Africa. Thus, the authors sought to define the hospital-level epidemiology of HIV infection. Based on their findings, they explore reasons why, in the presence of ART availability, a substantial number of admissions and deaths continue to occur.

"HIV-related medical admissions to a South African district hospital remain frequent despite effective antiretroviral therapy scale-up"
G Meintjes, AD Kerkhoff, R Burton, C Schutz, A Boulle, G Van Wyk, L Blumenthal, MP Nicol and SD Lawn
Medicine Vol. 94 Number 50, December 2015