The first five cases of what would later be known as HIV/AIDS were reported on June 5, 1981 in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR). Four decades later and almost 38 million people globally are living with HIV today.
Treatments and prevention methods and medicines have come a long way, however, allowing people living with HIV to live long and healthy lives while preventing further spread of the virus. Thanks to the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), HIV/AIDS commodities for treatment, testing and prevention have reached – and continue to reach – millions of people globally who need them through the Global Health Supply Chain Program-Procurement and Supply Management (GHSC-PSM) project.
Approaches such as multi-month dispensing (MMD) and decentralized drug distribution (DDD) focus on the individual and their needs to help with their treatment and care. Through MMD, patients like those in Angola, Cambodia, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Lesotho, Namibia and Zambia receive more than a month’s worth of medicine, saving them time and money on multiple trips to service delivery points. In conjunction with DDD, lifesaving HIV/AIDS commodities are brought closer to individuals, as can be observed in case studies from five countries in GHSC-PSM’s handbook on Supply Chain Considerations for Implementing Decentralized Drug Distribution.
Testing is also essential to end the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Expanding and transforming laboratory services to be cost effective, efficient and responsive is critical for patient needs. GHSC-PSM published a guide for implementing a network approach to strengthening and scaling up laboratory services that includes country examples of lessons learned, successes and challenges of implementation.
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PHOTOS: ©GHSC-PSM
The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) or the U.S. government.