By Nick Dall

As a community service doctor in 2006, Mhairi Maskew remembers a woman in her 30s who was wheeled into the clinic where she was working. The woman had a CD4 count — a measure of immunity where the healthy range is 500 to 1500 — of just 1. “I thought she’d never make it,” Maskew recalls. But thanks to antiretroviral therapy (ART), the woman was soon living a normal life again, unable to transmit HIV.

She is one of 5 million South Africans whose lives have been transformed by ART. The problem? A recent Lancet HIV paper (lead-authored by Maskew) shows that, despite those gains, only 44 percent of the country’s 15- to 19-year-olds who seek HIV care actually go ahead with ART. It doesn’t get much better with under-24s. Those concerns are now spawning a fast-expanding set of innovative tools targeted at youngsters who currently aren’t starting ART.

These include “adherence clubs” that provide peer support for those already in treatment; tablet and mobile apps to tackle stigma and misinformation; and youths-only clinics where youngsters don’t feel judged. The first hurdle is getting youth to understand that “an HIV diagnosis is no longer a death sentence,” says Dr. Anna Grimsrud, lead technical adviser for the International AIDS Society. Read more via OZY