Could building an all-male sports-like team with a coach help get men living with HIV onto antiretroviral treatment? (ArLawKa AungTun/Getty Images) South Africa needs to get more than one million people on ARV treatment – in addition to the 5.9 million who already are – before the end of 2025 to meet the global targets to end Aids by 2030. More than half of this number have to be men – a group the country has struggled to get, and keep, on ARVs so far.
Men don't get treatment for many reasons – from the stigma of HIV and the lifelong nature of the disease, to having to queue for a long time at clinics. South Africa needs to get about 1.14 million more people with HIV on treatment by the end of 2025 if the country wants to make good on the goals it signed up to to help end Aids by 2030 — and about half of them need to be men, a health department presentation showed at the International Aids Conference in Germany in July.
To reach the so-called 95-95-95 targets set by the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV and Aids (UNAids) , countries need to have 95% of all people with HIV diagnosed, 95% of this group on antiretroviral (ARV) medication, and 95% of those on treatment having so little virus in their bodies that they can't infect someone through unprotected sex (this is called viral suppression ). While South Africa is doing well with diagnosing men who have HIV (about 94%) , starting them on treatment lags behind. The Thembisa model , which the Department of Health.