All Africa IeDEA Conference

Project Summary Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) carries the greatest burden of HIV globally, and has in recent years experienced substantial declines in HIV incidence, morbidity and death. These achievements result from concerted and sustained national efforts to provide effective combination antiretroviral treatment (ART) to increasing proportions of all persons living with HIV (PLWH), guided by the World Health Organization's (WHO) guidelines for treatment and prevention of HIV infection. Current WHO guidelines recommend universal testing and treatment (UTT) both to prevent further HIV transmission and to improve the individual health of PLWH, and have recently been implemented in some form by most SSA countries. As UTT is implemented across Africa, it is critical to develop a research approach, methods and implementation agenda for the sub-Saharan African region, to provide timely assessment of progress and challenges to inform course corrections. The International Epidemiology Databases to Evaluate AIDS (IeDEA) network (www.iedea.org) is an international research consortium established in 2005 by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in seven regions throughout the world (in Africa, North and South America, and Asia), which collaborate to collect and define key variables, and implement methodology to effectively analyze data as a cost-effective means of generating large data sets to address the high priority HIV/AIDS research questions that are unanswerable by a single cohort. IeDEA has contributed substantially to the understanding of HIV treatment outcomes in Africa. The four IeDEA regions in sub-Saharan Africa (Central, East, West and Southern) have enrolled >1,000,000 patients receiving HIV care in 140 sites in 23 countries, and propose here to convene an ?All-Africa IeDEA? meeting in November 2017, in Kigali Rwanda (Central Africa IeDEA) to develop, disseminate and plan implementation of a research agenda that can provide countries and global planners with data, analysis and new methodologic approaches to best guide HIV treatment activities and contribute to ending the epidemic.