Social aspects of antiretroviral therapy scale-up: introduction and overview

For the hundreds of thousands of people whose lives have been improved and extended because they have access to antiretroviral therapy (ART) for HIV infection, scale-up has been a success. It is estimated that by mid-2006, in sub-Saharan Africa, 1 040 000 individuals had access to ART; in Asia, 235 000, and in Latin America and the Caribbean, 345000. The scale-up of ART is unprecedented, both in terms of financial scale and in terms of the conditions under which it began, which was not as a vertically imposed intervention but rather as an international response to a social movement making claims about equity.