Global public health efforts to address HIV and related communicable disease

Global efforts to address the HIV/AIDS pandemic have been framed within a public health approach that aims to simplify and standardize treatment and care interventions to support delivery of treatment and care at scale [1]. Key approaches include the use of standardized treatment regimens and monitoring approaches, promote task sharing and community involvement, and implement simplified and integrated service delivery. Together these approaches support access to care across the health system and remove barriers to accessing care when relying on specialized staff and resources [2 && ]. The public health approach has enabled 24.5 million people to receive antiretroviral therapy (ART) as of mid-2019 (https:// www.unaids.org/en/resources/fact-sheet). People living with HIV (PLHIV) are at increased risk of acquiring illness from common comorbidities, such as tuberculosis (TB), viral hepatitis, sexually transmitted infections (STIs), as well as a range of opportunistic infections, because of either shared routes of transmission or increased susceptibility due to immunosuppression. Syndemics are defined as the aggregation of two or more epidemics in a population that interact to exacerbate the burden and prognosis of both diseases [3,4].