HIV

Tashana Legall was born to a low income family in Guyana and lost both her parents to HIV/AIDS. In 2007, Tashana enrolled in a program for children orphaned or made vulnerable by HIV (HKID) at Comforting Hearts. The organization was a source of psychological, nutritional, spiritual and academic support to Tashana for several years. The continued nurturance and support from the staff at CH enabled Tashana to progress at school.

Gillian, a visually impaired 41-year-old, found out that she was HIV-positive when her family insisted that she go to the doctor because she was losing weight at a rapid rate. For 3 years she shut herself away from her family and friends, never disclosing her status to anyone. One day she decided to tell a classmate who happened to be a social worker at Lifeline Counselling Services (LCS) and enrolled Gillian in a People Living with HIV (PLHIV) and AIDS support group at LCS.

Queenie, or Q as she sometimes goes by, is an HIV positive, transgender (trans) person living in Guyana. When Q fell ill after defaulting on anti-retroviral therapy (ART), she was hesitant to resume her treatment. Given the stigma and discrimination Q had experienced in the hospital as a trans person, she was not looking forward to going back alone. So she reached out to Guyana Trans United (GTU), an organization that supports the trans community, for assistance.

Key populations in the Dominican Republic have HIV prevalence rates that are six to twelve times higher than the national average of 0.8 percent. Although there are multiple players committed to tackling the concentrated HIV epidemic, large gaps in coverage and access to HIV prevention, care and treatment services remain.

January 25, 2016 to January 28, 2016
Event

APC is playing an active role in the 2016 International Conference on Family Planning (ICFP) in Nusa Dua, Indonesia from January 25-28. Our members will come together with other experts in the family planning community to share best practices, acknowledge past successes and challenges, and plan for the future.

December 27, 2018
General News

2018 brought a year’s worth of successes for APC across our work in family planning, HIV, the post-Ebola response, and community health around the world. Continue on to see our work in action throughout the year.

November 28, 2018
Announcement

The videos, created by APC/Guyana with technical assistance from JSI, which are also available for audio-only broadcasting, talk about the importance of getting tested; disclosing status and testing partners; the ART regimen; and adhering to it.

Patient navigators community leaders and peers are (members of key population groups and most on treatment themselves) who support linkage to care and follow up for newly diagnosed HIV individuals and provide essential counseling to strengthen treatment adherence.

At the end of March 2018, there was a 71 percent data discrepancy between pre-ART patients reported in the government’s FAPPS database (a component of the national HIV services information system) and the pre-ART patients reported after reviewing medical records at the six clinical sites supported by APC in the Dominican Republic.

Since initiation of Test and START at six APC-supported clinical sites in FY17, the average number of days from diagnosis to initiation of treatment for newly diagnosed patients dropped from 30 days to seven days by September 2017, and was further reduced to an average 3.9 days by September 2018.

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