This digest is brought to you by the podcast HIV: The Morning After.

A Rio plenary reported that cash transfer programmes were associated with a 39% drop in AIDS deaths, and that Black women with less education face nearly five times the AIDS death risk of wealthier white women, according to the International AIDS Society.

With a mother’s virus fully suppressed, real-world data put the risk of passing HIV through breastfeeding at under 1%, and Argentina reported no infections among 15 breastfeeding mother-and-infant pairs, though researchers stressed the numbers remain small, according to the International AIDS Society.

The Philippines has the fastest-growing HIV epidemic in the Asia-Pacific region, with up to 56% of people entering care between 2019 and 2024 already having advanced HIV disease, and about a quarter of people starting treatment in South Africa doing so with advanced disease, according to the International AIDS Society.

This digest is brought to you by the podcast HIV: The Morning After.

Fiji’s first molecular surveillance of its fast-growing HIV outbreak found three large transmission clusters, with no needle and syringe programmes in place and progress far behind the global testing-and-treatment targets (standing at 40, 22 and 3 against a goal of 95, 95, 95), according to the International AIDS Society.

Real-world rollouts of the after-sex antibiotic doxyPEP brought large, sustained falls in syphilis and chlamydia but not gonorrhoea, while the 4CMenB vaccine showed no protective effect against gonorrhoea across three trials, according to the International AIDS Society.

A Bundibugyo Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo — a major focus at the HIV conference — had reached 2,905 confirmed cases and 1,269 deaths by 22 July, a case fatality rate of 43.7%, with figures still evolving, according to the International AIDS Society.

This digest is brought to you by the podcast HIV: The Morning After.

Two new cases of long-term HIV remission following a stem-cell transplant from a donor with a rare genetic resistance to HIV (CCR5-delta32) were presented, both with serious complications including a hepatitis B reactivation and incomplete engraftment with several infections, according to the International AIDS Society.

In the small, ongoing Tatelo-plus paediatric study in Botswana, all infants remained undetectable at 24 weeks on broadly neutralising antibodies, though one researcher cautioned that antibodies plus lenacapavir amount to suppression rather than a cure, according to the International AIDS Society.