LEN can stop HIV. But first, people need to understand it

The last person I expected to catch me off guard that summer’s evening was my 52-year-old aunt. We were roasting fresh maize around a fire in Chisamba, a rural farming town about 100km from Lusaka. “Is the injection which cures HIV available in Zambia?” she asked. It was December 2025, about a decade after my aunt had been diagnosed with HIV. I came home for Christmas from South Africa, where I was a postdoctoral researcher at the South African Medical Research Council. In late November that year, Zambia had become one of the first two countries (the other country was Eswatini) to receive the first (albeit small) shipments of lenacapavir (LEN), the once-every-six-month HIV prevention injection, which South Africa also started to roll out in June this year. My aunt had a complete misconception of what LEN could and couldn’t do.