News | 9 Nov 2021
Along with the life-saving Covid-19 vaccines that were developed over the past 18 months through unprecedented global scientific collaboration, a number of treatment and prevention advances have provided some much-needed good news to round off 2021. ‘Functional’ cure for HIV moves to human trials American drug company, Excision BioTherapeutics, has announced that their new treatment, called EBT-101, received FDA approval to progress to human trials. The treatment uses The Nobel Prize-winning CRISPR gene-editing technology to cut numerous pieces of the HIV genome in a bid to make it unable to mutate inside the body. This one-off treatment could potentially mean that…
Sex workers are often stereotyped, exposed, stigmatised and misrepresented in the media. This can have a negative impact, not only on individual sex workers, but on the sex worker rights movement as a whole. Sex workers are ordinary people working to support themselves and their families and, just like any other person, should be treated with fairness and dignity. NACOSA’s key populations team have pulled together some simple pointers to guide journalists and media houses when reporting on sex work and sex workers. Key facts Sex workers are female, male and transgender adults aged over 18 years who sell consensual…
News | 9 Nov 2021
“It’s quite hard being an unemployed youth, it’s depressing at times and expensive also as job-hunting is a full-time job,” says a young women on the My Journey Programme. As young women are one of the populations most vulnerable to HIV in South Africa, the My Journey Adolescent Girls and Young Women programme, funded by the Global Fund, aims to decrease HIV incidence. Some of the drivers of risk for young women include unemployment, poverty and lack of economic opportunity, so NACOSA implements an economic strengthening intervention as part of the My Journey programme. The programme is aimed at young…
News | 8 Nov 2021
NACOSA was honoured to join SANAC, the SANAC Civil Society Forum, the Departments of Health and Justice, the Global Fund, the United Nations Population Fund and the Sisonke sex worker movement at the launch of the second National Sex Worker HIV, TB and STI Plan 2019-2022 (NSWP 2019-2022). The plan builds on the strengths of the first Sex Worker HIV Plan (2016-2019), addressing gaps identified over the past three years and supports the call for the decriminalisation of sex work. The NSWP 2019-2022 also introduces several improvements to address the challenges in delivering available, accessible, acceptable and quality HIV, TB,…
