What We Do
Prevention Access Campaign’s collaborative advocacy, education, and communications work has resulted in historic global changes to the official risk assessments of HIV sexual transmission. Together, we’re changing the narrative about living and loving with HIV.
Advocate
Advocacy
PAC’s collaborative advocacy has resulted in historic global changes to the official assessment of HIV transmission risk. These changes are transforming the lives of millions of people living with HIV, their partners, and the field. In close collaboration with influential leaders at all levels — from grassroots to government to global — we work toward systemic changes to improve the quality of life for people living with HIV and strengthen efforts to end the epidemic.
PAC supports global and in-country partners at they move health ministries and other influential medical, research, and public health bodies to:
- implement policies to reduce barriers to treatment, care, and diagnostics to improve personal and public health
- integrate the U=U science into HIV guidelines and official communications
- promote and/or require U=U education within their countries/regions
- develop national strategies for sustainable and effective countrywide U=U programs
U=U adds an essential “public health” or “Win-Win” rationale in our advocacy. When people living with HIV have the treatment, care, and services they need to stay undetectable, they stay healthy and cannot transmit HIV through sex. So, treatment, care, and services for individuals living with HIV are also good for the economic, social and public health of the community. PAC and partners are strengthening the global advocacy narrative by promoting the U=U public health rationale and Win-Win Agenda in the fight for universal access to treatment and care. For more information on the Win-Win Agenda and using U=U in public health policy and advocacy see Win-Win Agenda and U=U Public Health Benefits.
Activism
In addition to advocacy, PAC and partners influence key leaders and institutions by organizing live and virtual demonstrations worldwide. While most of our work has been at the diplomatic discussion level, some of our strategies, especially in the start-up phase, have included more public activist tactics to hold stakeholders accountable and pressure them toward action.
Educate
Education and Training Center
In collaboration with U=U partners and researchers, we offer training and technical support to civil society organizations, health ministries, private industry, and other stakeholders on a range of areas including:
- Effective U=U communications
- Taking U=U to Scale: Lessons learned from country-wide U=U programs
- A History of the U=U message and movement
- U=U as Win-Win in Advocacy for Health Equity
- Understanding the science of U=U
- Incorporating U=U into strategies to end the HIV epidemic
- U=U for healthcare professionals
- U=U in the context of criminal law
- U=U, women, sex and parenting
- U=U in the transgender community
- HIV in the media: Training for journalists
- Overcoming challenges to U=U implementation
- Country and community-specific training
Please contact Brady Dale Etzkorn-Morris to explore how PAC can support your education and implementation goals.
U=U Resource Center
Our U=U Resource Center provides opportunities to learn and educate about U=U, including downloadable tools and materials from U=U partners about all aspects of U=U. The Resource Center includes a searchable database and highlights of U=U websites, graphics, and videos. We will continually update the Resource Center as we develop and curate resources with U=U partners around the world. Please contact us if you have feedback on the U=U Resource Center or have suggestions for additional resources. We appreciate your thoughts!
Communicate
Branding
Prevention Access Campaign, along with activist journalist Gus Cairns, researchers, and community advocates, coined the “Undetectable = Untransmittable” and the “U=U” slogans as prescriptive and descriptive ways to easily describe the science of HIV transmission when a person with HIV is virally suppressed. The phrase is based on Treatment as Prevention (TasP), coined by Julio Montaner in 2006, and over twenty years of research.
- U=U is prescriptive: It indicates the level or viral suppression required: undetectable.
- U=U is descriptive: It describes the reduction in transmission risk: untransmittable.
- U=U is empowering: U=U has become a rallying cry for the empowerment of people living with HIV worldwide. U=U has fostered hope, intimacy, and freedom for people living with HIV, some for the first time since diagnosis.
PAC intentionally did not trademark U=U. It was our vision from the beginning that people everywhere would feel that U=U belongs to them. We are thrilled that has become a reality!
The message has been translated into at least fifty languages. For instance, U=U is I=I in Spain, Argentina, and Brazil; B=B in Turkey; N=N in The Netherlands and Germany; M=M and I=I in Venezuela; H=H in Russia; O=O in Uganda and Norway; S=S in Zambia; K=K in Vietnam and many more.
U=U is recognized in the official communications of the leading world’s leading medical, research and public health institutions including WHO, PEPFAR, CDC, UNAIDS, USAID, the United Nations General Assembly, and in the HIV treatment guidelines of many health ministries.
Very few brands, if any, organically reach over 100 countries and are globally accepted and institutionalized within just a few years. This is a testament to the power of science and people living with HIV!
Social Marketing
Our aim is to make it easy for anyone to educate about U=U.
We share social marketing campaigns and foster collaboration to maximize our partners’ resource efficiency and avoid reinventing the wheel, especially those organizations with limited resources. Our U=U Resource Center includes shareable and downloadable examples of U=U social marketing campaigns and materials.
In 2018, we partnered with ViiV Healthcare to address the lack of accessible U=U campaigns in the United States, creating Series+, an innovative, creative, and easily customizable campaign to educate about U=U and encourage engagement in care. Series+ enables organizations to feel a sense of ownership over the campaign by adding their logo and customizing content.
The global U=U movement thrives on social media, especially Twitter. Fueled by PAC, the hashtag #UequalsU helps connect, inspire, and educate people across the world.
Messaging Monitoring
PAC monitors information providers, including niche and mainstream media, to ensure that descriptions of HIV transmission risk reflect the current science of U=U. PAC has successfully corrected the language of many state, national and global HIV information providers as well as articles in publications such as Newsweek, VOX, US Magazine, Orlando Sentinel, Minneapolis Post, St. Louis Public Radio, and many HIV/AIDS related publications.