The United States government through PEPFAR International has delivered to Malawi Government the first shipment of injectable Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) medicine for HIV prevention, making Malawi the third country in Africa to offer injectable PrEP.
Injectable PrEP is a safe and effective HIV prevention tool that provides clients with two months of HIV protection between injection.
The donation of 9000 vials of injectable PrEP – called Cabotegravir Long Acting (CAB-LA) – to Malawi’s Ministry of Health will be rolled out to two districts of Blantyre and Lilongwe.
“We have started with Blantyre and Lilongwe because for the past two years, they are the two districts that registered very high numbers of people who are getting infected amongst all the other districts” explained Rose Nyirenda, the Director in the department of HIV, STI, Viral Hepatitis in the Ministry of health.
In addition, Nyirenda narrated that since the doses are few to accommodate all, the ministry has decided to start with six facilities before extending to 31 facilities later this year.
She further made it clear that there are special people who will be eligible to get the long-acting injectable PrEP.
“This injectable PrEP will be provided to individuals who tests negative but also those at substantial risks of HIV and some of them are female sex workers, truck drivers, fishermen” she saidMeanwhile, Nyirenda said she is happy with the progress Malawi has made in the fight against HIV.
She added that the number of new infected people has tremendously dropped from 4 out of every 1000 in 2015 to 2 out of 1000 now, representing just 0.02 percent of new infections.
The Director of Programs at National Aids Commission (NAC) Chimwemwe Mablekisi commended the introduced of long-acting injectable PrEP saying it will help to complement their efforts of ending HIV threat by 2030.
“As you are aware, our goal is to end HIV as a public health threat by 2030 and for us to achieve that we need to ensure that we have as many HIV prevention as we can” said Mablekisi.
She added “One of the guiding principles for HIV response in Malawi is the human rights approach, to give people options to their HIV prevention choices that they can take so we feel that injectable PrEP will really help us to reduce new HIV infections in particular that we are targeting those most at risk to contracting HIV”.
Mablekisi further advised people to keep using the combination prevention methods to avoid contracting different STI’s since long-acting injectable PrEP is only for HIV prevention.
In January 2021, Malawi rolled out the implementation of oral PrEP for HIV prevention following a successful pilot phase within the country.As of today, over 100,000 individuals are on oral PrEP.
However, almost half of those clients are continuing on Oral PrEP for various reasons.
Inorder to provide options for those eligible to access PrEP, Long-acting injectable PrEP was introduced and launched in September 2023 and is being promoted alongside Oral PrEP and other HIV prevention methods such as condoms, VMMC, STI screening and treatment.
