It is obvious that worldwide access to HIV drugs is essential if we are to save the lives of millions of infected people. A key concept in HIV public health is now that of treatment as prevention, whereby HIV-infected people who take their antiretroviral therapy (ART) attain viral suppression, thereby also rendering them noninfectious for their sexual partners [1–3]. This, in turn, has led to the WHO policy of 90-90-90 that strives to identify 90% of HIV-infected persons in the world so that 90% of them can be started on ART and, furthermore, so that 90% of the latter will have undetectable viral loads. This approach has created hope that the sustained transmission of HIV might be prevented and even that the epidemic might be ended by 2030. Of course, this objective depends on people taking their anti-HIV pill regimens as prescribed so that high-level adherence to treatment can be achieved.

Against this background, the current issue of AIDS contains a very important manuscript by the group of Martine Peeters of Montpellier, France by Arenas et al.[4]. In this study, the authors monitored the extent to which resistance mutations developed in treatmentexperienced individuals harboring a diversity of HIV-1 viral subtypes that are present in west and central Africa. Although the patterns of emergent drug resistance were similar for the predominant CRF02_AG viruses and undefined recombinant forms to those previously observed for subtype-B-infected individuals in western settings [5], there was a relatively high frequency of emergent resistance mutations among the treatmentexperienced population receiving ARTs for a median of