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13 mars 2025
LA SANTÉ COMMUNAUTAIRE ET MONDIALE
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The Desmond Tutu Health Foundation Reduces the Impact of HIV and TB in South Africa
The Desmond Tutu Health Foundation has spent the past 20 years trying to reduce the impact of HIV, TB, and other communicable diseases in some of the hardest-hit communities in South Africa. Prof. Linda-Gail Bekker, CEO of the Desmond Tutu Health Foundation, discusses how innovation has helped the organization's mission so that nobody is left behind.
Bekker and Elzette Rousseau, Ph.D., Co-investigator FASTPrEP, Desmond Tutu Health Foundation, discuss the FASTPrEP program, which seeks to bring HIV prevention to young people in communities we know that HIV is circulating and there is a large burden of disease.
Transcription
Linda-Gail Bekker:
The Desmond Tutu Health Foundation has spent the last 20 years really trying to find ways to reduce the impact of HIV, TB and other communicable diseases in some of the communities that are hardest hit. This has very much been based on finding innovation, particularly around new treatments, new preventions, and ways to deliver those interventions such that nobody is left behind. The most recent of these is a project called Fast Prep, which seeks to bring pre-exposure prophylaxis and HIV prevention in its broader sense to particularly young people in communities where we know that HIV is circulating and there is a large burden of disease.
Elzette Rousseau:
We do that by taking mobile clinics into the facility. We go into schools. We provide a career service. So really how can people get access to prep as quickly as possible, but also the latest prep products, not just oral prep that they can find in the public health system, but also your newer injectable, longer-acting prep products.
Esethu:
I think it's for my own safety because I'm young, I go out sometimes, anything can happen.
Sihle:
It's a very dangerous country. Also, you do not know the partners that we date, how safe they are. So it helps you as a woman having something that you also know that you are also relying on.
Linda-Gail Bekker:
We are saying this is about the client, it's about the patient, it's about the person at the center and how do we arrange our services and really make it work for their lives and stay in care because this has been our very difficult thing to do is to get people to pick up on prevention and to stick with it. STIs run as high as HIV and TB in some of these communities, so it's important that we also provide sexual health services.
Elzette Rousseau:
So contraception, STI testing and treatment alongside with the prep that you get. Now, when we can go to people, we can educate them better on STIs and then at that point of education can say, "Would you like to have the test? Would you like to get the results right now and get treated?" And in that way, we are stopping people from reinfecting or infecting their partners as well, and we can try to stop the STI pandemic that we are seeing.
Linda-Gail Bekker:
Point-of-care diagnostics make this absolutely feasible. The most recent that we are very, very excited about is the provision of viral load testing, so HIV Viral Load Diagnostics.
Ande Kolisa:
It's a criteria that before receiving prep, you must first test for HIV.
Elzette Rousseau:
If you really want to make an impact on healthcare, you need to involve the community. You need to involve the people that the healthcare is for. And that's really something that we do with FASTPrEP. We are a youth-led program, so we engage young people all the time in the design of our services. And I think that is why we are seeing such a huge number of young people coming to us for services, feeling like they're not stigmatized, and that they can access sexually reproductive and education and healthcare from us.
Linda-Gail Bekker:
And what we found is that persistence to prep has improved. This gives us real hope that these kinds of programs, if we could roll them out in similar communities and in similar settings, could really start to make a difference to the HIV epidemic and bend that curve of new infections and get us towards epidemic control.
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