Two Mapping Pathways Abstracts Accepted for ICASA Conference

* Original content from our Mapping Pathways blog team

The Mapping Pathways initiative has had two conference abstracts accepted at the 16th International Conference on HIV/AIDS and Sexually Transmitted Infections in Africa (ICASA). The conference, which will be held in Ethiopia this year from December 4-8th, is the principal forum on HIV/AIDS and STIs in Africa. This year’s conference theme is “Own, Scale-Up and Sustain”, and as the ICASA website elaborates:

* Owning encompasses playing the lead role in HIV/AIDS and STI prevention, treatment, care and support at policy, strategy, programs, implementation as well as M&E levels by the primary stakeholders.

* Due to the current global financial and economic crises, HIV and AIDS programs are facing funding challenges. Such challenges may entail a sliding back from what has been gained thus far in Africa with respect to containing the pandemic, and mitigating its impacts. Therefore the theme is an alert call and an attempt to draw attention to the urgent need to sustain.

* Since there are huge gaps in prevention, treatment, care and support, sustaining what has been achieved is not enough. Therefore, we cannot think of sustaining without enhancing scaling up of all responses in order to address the critical gaps.

It is an honor that the Mapping Pathways team has been selected to conduct two poster presentations at the conference, which is expecting more than 10,000 delegates from around the world, including experts in the fields of HIV/AIDS, STIs, TB, and Malaria.. One presentation is more policy-oriented—it will highlight the key policy and program challenges and implications for future treatment strategies which use ARVs for HIV prevention. It will focus on what the evidence is saying and what policymakers need to be thinking about when making decisions.  The second presentation’s focus is on the comparative findings across the different parts of the Mapping Pathway study and what the project’s findings mean for the wider research agenda.

“This is a great way to engage with the international community on what we’re finding, and to get feedback on our research from key opinion leaders,” says Molly Morgan Jones of RAND Europe, a Mapping Pathways partner organization. Morgan Jones is currently conducting the Mapping Pathways Literature Review, a big-picture review of all the existing material published on ARV-based prevention strategies to date. The review, an important research component of the Mapping Pathways project, is a way to identify the overall nature of the existing evidence-base on ARV-based prevention strategies, including whether gaps exist. The aim is  identify to finding ways to fill these gaps. Read more about the Literature Review and some of the big-picture trends emerging here.

[Content that is linked from other sources is for informational purposes and should not construe a Mapping Pathways position.]