Social determinants of health—the social conditions in which people grow up, live and work—can influence the risk of contracting AIDS and the mortality associated with the disease. This is the main conclusion of a new study carried out by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health and published inThe research team evaluated a cohort of 28.3 million people, representative of the low-income Brazilian population, based on data collected between 2007 and 2015.
Despite Brazil's pioneering response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, being the first middle-income country to offer free antiretroviral treatment to all people living with the disease and widespread free HIV testing, the mortality rate from the disease in Brazil in 2020 was six per 100,000 inhabitants. Of the new infections registered in Latin America in 2020, almost half were recorded in Brazil.