“Individuals with recent HIV infection often have higher viral loads than individuals with a long-term infection,” said Jessica Justman, MD, ICAP’s senior technical director and principal investigator of TRACE. “This means it’s especially important to identify recently infected individuals so they can rapidly start HIV treatment and gain the health benefits that follow. In addition, the new test makes it possible to track clusters of recent infections and mobilize testing and prevention efforts to prevent HIV transmission.”

In Nigeria, ICAP is training health workers to provide real-time data of recent HIV infections in order to more efficiently direct public health resources. In 2020, as the training program gained momentum, COVID-19 threatened to interrupt the progress of TRACE efforts by making travel and face-to-face training programs dangerous for both ICAP’s team and in-country health care workers.                       

At a time when Nigeria is facing two public health emergencies, namely COVID-19 and HIV, identifying people with undiagnosed HIV infection, especially those who have been recently infected, could not be more important,” said Adewale Akinjeji, ICAP country director in Nigeria. Recognizing what was at stake in maintaining this work, ICAP leveraged digital meeting platforms and online teaching methods to safely deliver trainings to frontline health care workers.