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HIV-infected men in South Africa are nearly one-third more like to die than women, even though both receive similar treatment. But researchers say they don’t know why. University of Cape Town’s Morna Cornell led a team of researchers who looked at more than 46,000 adults taking antiretrovirals drugs between 2002 and 2009. “Why we started looking at this was because increasing numbers of studies are coming out, which are reporting that men have a higher risk of death on antiretrovirals than women. And obviously this is an issue of great concern and something we wanted to understand a bit more,” she said. Studies show that, in fact, men are one-third more likely to die than women during treatment. But Cornell said too often researchers may simply assume they know why, when in fact they do not. “These papers are published. They find higher mortality, but that they conclude that this is largely due to individual-level factors. They argue that it's because men come in later for treatment. It’s because men are less likely to be adherent to their treatment. They are suggesting maybe men are more likely to be lost to follow-up from a program and then to die. Maybe they’ve got different virologic responses or they’re not taking the treatment properly, et cetera,” she said. Cornell said she wanted to study in a “very systematic way” all the possible explanations as to why men have a much greater risk of death. | 
