For decades, public health efforts across sub-Saharan Africa have focused on HIV prevention, testing and treatment campaigns on children, and women of reproductive age, overlooking the population at older ages.
At present, the high success of antiretroviral therapy (ART) campaigns, together with the continuous efforts to achieve the UNAids 95-95-95 HIV targets – that 95% of people with HIV know their status, 95% of those are on treatment, and 95% of those have suppressed viral loads – have reduced the HIV treatment gap in many African countries. In turn this has dramatically increased the life expectancy of people living with HIV.
One consequence of this is that the HIV epidemic is increasingly affecting older people. Due to this increase in life expectancy in the population living with HIV, the HIV epidemic has experienced an ageing process.
