A breather from daily antiretroviral therapy for adolescents

The global scale-up of antiretroviral therapy (ART) has resulted in HIV infection being transformed from an inevitably fatal disease to a chronic, albeit incurable, infection requiring life-long treatment.1 Increasing numbers of children infected through mother-to-child HIV transmission, who would have died in infancy in the pre-ART era, are now reaching adolescence and face the prospect of having to take ART daily with optimum adherence for the rest of their lives.2–4