Europe Gets Closer to 90-90-90 Target

Western European countries are getting closer to the UNAIDS 90-90-90 target, says the study, published in Clinical Infectious Diseases journal.  Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the UK, 11 countries were included in the research. According to the data of four years, eleven countries have already reached 84 percentage amount of people diagnosed with HIV and on the ART and 85 percent of HIV-positive people have their viral load successfully suppressed.  Denmark and Sweden have already reached 90-90-90 target, hopefully the other countries will join them soon.

The authors of the study found regions like Italy, Greece, Spain and the UK with few amount of people diagnosed with HIV. Treatment guidelines of these countries are to blame as well as the differences in start of ART therapy  in patients with less than 350 CD4 level.

“The greatest drop between successive stages of the continuum was observed between the number of people living with HIV and the number diagnosed, with 16% of undiagnosed individuals falling out of the continuum. European countries are nearing the 90-90-90 target,” conclude the authors. “Reducing the proportion undiagnosed remains the greatest barrier to achieving this target, suggesting that further efforts are needed to improve HIV testing rates. Standardising methods to derive comparable continuums of care remains a challenge.” - said the authors of the study.