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Using routine data and advocacy to identify and address gaps in HIV services for men in sub-Saharan Africa: a personal journey

October 13, 2021

Date & time: 3rd of November 12:00-13:00 GMT (London time)

Webinar now available on our Youtube Channel, or see below.

For the Q&A from the webinar, please see here.

For all the documents mentioned by Dr Morna during the webinar please see this folder.

This is the fourth webinar part of the MeSH Webinar Series: Strengthening Routine HIV Data – A Female Researcher’s Perspective. Through a series of webinars running from August to November, discover the perspective and work of brilliant women in the HIV field. They will discuss their contributions to strengthening the understanding, collection, analysis, and use of routine HIV data towards the aim of accelerating and tracking HIV decline in sub-Saharan Africa. Each webinar will be a live with 20-30 minutes of presentation, followed by 20-30 minutes of discussion with the audience. Make sure to follow MeSH on twitter and the website for the next series events.

This webinar will be presented by Dr Morna Cornell from the University of Cape Town, South Africa.

The heaviest HIV burden globally is in sub-Saharan Africa, home to two-thirds of all people living with HIV. Within sub-Saharan Africa, eastern and southern Africa (ESA) is the epicentre of the pandemic, but it is also where the most impressive gains in HIV prevention and treatment have been made. However, access to and outcomes in HIV care are marked by persistent gender disparities. Women have higher HIV incidence than men, but men have consistently fared worse than women in levels of HIV testing and ART initiation. In 2019 in west and central Africa for example, only 63% of men compared with 77% of women had tested for HIV, while 78% and 88% respectively were on ART. In ESA, the disparities were less, but with the highest HIV incidence worldwide, these differences translate into thousands of lives. During this webinar, Dr Cornell will reflect on her unusual journey from activism for the rights of people living with HIV in the early 1990s to mid-2000s, to public health research and advocacy in more recent years. Using routine data from large ART cohorts in South Africa (the largest ART programme globally), Dr Cornell will argue for an equitable HIV response based on both human rights and epidemiology and highlight the importance of advocacy based on good evidence.

Dr Morna Cornell is Senior Research Officer at the Centre for Infectious Disease Epidemiology & Research, School of Public Health & Family Medicine, University of Cape Town, South Africa, and a commissioner on the Lancet Commission on Gender & Global Health. Morna has worked in HIV/AIDS for nearly 30 years, including as the Director of the AIDS Consortium and later as a consultant for the Western Cape Department of Health. She managed the multisite CIPRA-SA (Comprehensive International Programme of Research on HIV/AIDS) programme from inception to closure. Since 2007, she has managed and undertaken research in the IeDEA-SA (International Epidemiology Databases to Evaluate AIDS – Southern Africa) regional scientific collaboration. Her PhD utilised routine data from IeDEA-SA to assess the evolution and effectiveness of the South African ART programme.

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