April 16th, 2020- A critical call to action was voiced in a recent publication co-authored by Drs. Steve Shoptaw, Raphael Landovitz, and David Goodman-Meza, faculty members of UCLA CHIPTS. The article, entitled “Collective Call to Action for HIV/AIDS Community-Based Collaborative Science in the Era of COVID-19”, highlights the significant impacts of the current COVID-19 pandemic on the nation’s “already strained health systems,” adding further complexity to many co-occurring epidemics and subsequently disrupting forward-focused eradication initiatives. This includes those created for the Ending the HIV Epidemic (EtHE).
The publication keenly acknowledges the need to “re-purpose scientific, clinical, and material resources” as an essential pandemic response tactic, prioritize “trickle down caring” alongside trickle-down economics, and collaboratively coordinate COVID-19 shifts within community-based HIV efforts. “We need now to integrate into our objectives shifts that accommodate responses needed for COVID-19 and to maintain commitments to make measurable progress not only to maintain gains in HIV treatment and prevention, but to end the HIV epidemic.”
Major insights were further provided on key HIV treatment measures presently in use and their foregoing relations to the COVID-19 crisis, such as Undetectable is Untransmittable, Pre-exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP), and HIV testing/counseling.
Read more on this call to action here, or download the PDF version available below.
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