WHILE South Africans now seem less concerned about HIV than in previous years, a young professor from the University of KwaZulu-Natal(UKZN) has raised the alarm about the escalating number of teenage girls who are increasingly infected by sugar daddies.
Professor Rubeshan Perumal was concerned that medical researchers, the government, non-governmental organisations, and media were now more relaxed in waging the fight against the disease.
The award-winning pulmonologist from UKZN, said the disease was still prevalent as out of the 1.3 million new daily infections detected internationally in 2023, South Africa had its fair share of 150 000 new infections per year.
Perumal practises at the Inkosi Albert Luthuli Central Hospital, and is a Head of TB/HIV Treatment Research at the Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa (CAPRISA)
“That is a phenomenal number, 150 000 infection in 365 days is a staggering number of new infections a day, which is 410 infections per day,” commented Perumal about the spread of the infection.
UKZN recently accorded him the 2024 Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Research Excellence to recognize his exceptional contributions to researching tuberculosis (TB) and HIV cases local and internationally.
Perumal, who grew up in Reservoir Hills, said it was still a concern that young women and adolescent girls were caught up in a vicious cycle of HIV transmission as they were victims of older men who were taking advantage of their socio-economic situations.
“This is a group of people who are particularly vulnerable to new infections mostly because of the way young women and adolescent girls are romantically and sexually involved with men who are several years older than them,” he said.
He said studies showed that HIV-positive men would infect younger women.
“This leads to a vicious cycle within our communities where these women when they become older, they transmit the virus to men who are of their age and then those men continue to transmit to virus to younger women,” he said.
He said KwaZulu-Natal was still far from being out of the woods as it was still leading in terms of the number of infections.
“KwaZulu-Natal continues to be a problem that is besieged by high levels of new infections of HIV among young people between 15 and 24.
“I think this has to do with socio-economic patterns, the behavioural dynamic of particularly young women and older men which seems to be more prevalent in this province than other provinces,” he said.
According to Perumal there were also infected people in the province who seemed to have stopped taking antiretroviral (ARV) drugs.
“When people stop taking ARVs, not only their personal health is affected, but they also become infectious again and they can transmit the infection to other people,” he said.
Perumal, whose focus was on optimising treatments for drug-resistant TB, one of the leading causes of mortality worldwide, said although the world had done great in stabilising the disease, the problem was that ARVs were required to be taken every day for life, which discouraged patients from getting into the treatment program.
“We are still searching for the cure for HIV, and until we find the cure for people who are living with HIV or an effective preventative vaccine, we will depend on lifelong treatment,” he said.
He warned that if patients stopped taking ARVs, it would cause the virus to replicate, “and over time the number of viruses that are in the person’s body would start to increase quite dramatically.
“And an individual who is going without treatment would eventually suffer the consequences of a waning immune system and that means more infection, particularly TB which is common with people living with HIV,” he said.
Perumal has published over 70 “high-impact peer-reviewed articles in prestigious journals such as The Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine, and Lancet Infectious Diseases.”
“As a principal investigator or co-investigator on over 10 clinical trials, his efforts continue to shape the future of TB and HIV treatment and care,” UKZNsaid in a statement.
Perumal, the son of the late medical scientist Professor Ronnie Perumal said he was also concerned about the spread of TB, another silent killer, which unlike HIV was curable. “TB is a public health emergency around the world and it has been so for over a decade now, but it gets less attention, although 1.5 million die people from TB every year in the world.
“In the country, deaths were over 60 000 yearly when it was last measured in 2022 despite that it is a curable disease,” he said.