Home page of the Jilinde PrEP programme in Kenya
This year's HIV Research for Prevention (HIVR4P) virtual conference featured a large number of sessions examining PrEP usage and discontinuation rates among a variety of users, especially in Africa.
Many of the presentations looked at factors that worked as incentives to keep taking PrEP. There is interest in this because, despite higher initiation rates in a larger number of countries than ever before, the retention rates (also called persistence rates) of people in PrEP programmes in the region remain very low.
Kate Segal from AVAC gave a summary of where the world is at in terms of PrEP initiations, as reported by Krishen Samuel here. In sub-Saharan Africa, over half a million people have started PrEP since 2016 and initiations overtook those in North America during the second half of 2018.