SAfm, Sunday morning

Such beautiful success and tangible and quantifiable success with the introduction of ARVs. But you're suggesting that there's been a bit of a change in trends. A regression of sorts. A regression of sorts. Can you tell us more about that? Sure. So, yeah, I am the director of the South African Center for Epidemiological Modelling and Analysis at Stellenbosch University. And what this study did, which was conducted

In northern KwaZulu-Natal was followed up an entire population for over 20 years and look at the rate of new HIV infections, and new HIV infections tell you where you're going in the epidemic. And what we saw is that, as you alluded to, there's these kind of spectacular reductions, particularly between about 2012 and 2018, but since

2019 onwards, we've seen a concerning stagnation. So a loss of momentum. So no longer continuing to go down, but staying absolutely flat. And so, you know, this does mean that we are starting to lose momentum and we need to find a way of getting it back. You know, when we were busy introducing this conversation, Professor, at the beginning of the show, we had a bit of a conversation between

Where she spoke about attitudes because she does work in the space, sexual health. And she was making a point that she's been making with me for a while, which is whenever she goes and she talks to young people, she finds that there is almost a certain level of complacency that has crept in, where almost like young people are significantly more afraid, for instance, of

Falling pregnant than they are of the HIV. It's almost like a case of being us victims of our success in the fact that the HIV messaging, where we have said to remove the stigma around HIV, seems to now have led to a certain level of complacency amongst the youth where they just feel like, well, we all know that if I get this particular virus, I have one pill to pop and I'll be okay. So that is anecdotal.

From just the work that she is doing. But when it comes to the data, are we clear about what is at the very core of the decline in that particular consciousness, Professor? Yeah, thank you. I think there may be some truth to that complacency argument. But what we have seen, so that one of the major, if not the major driver of new HIV infections is the amount of viral

Suppression in the population. So, you know, are people getting onto treatment? Are they taking their treatment? Because that we've shown directly impacts on UHIV infections. And what we've seen is an increase in people who are not suppressing or decrease in population level viral suppression. And so that's one of the major factors that's going on.