RETRACTED ARTICLE: Magnitude and Determinants of Virological Failure Among Patients >15 Years on Anti-Retroviral Therapy in Rural Lesotho Between 2015 and 2019 – A Retrospective Cohort Study

This paper has been retracted.

Lejone TI, Mahomed O. HIV AIDS (Auckl). 2023;15:611–620.

At the author’s request, we, the Editors and Publisher of HIV/AIDS – Research and Palliative Care have retracted the following article.

Following publication, the Principal Investigators and data owners, informed the journal that the underlying data presented in the article was made available to the first author for the purpose of a Master’s thesis only; this master thesis was supervised by the last author who has no other connection to the cohort. As per prior agreement, any publication arising from the cohort must appropriately acknowledge, and be approved by the study investigators. Here, the Principal Investigators were not aware of, nor did they approve of the publication. In addition, the manuscript contains several errors and imprecisions that may have arisen at least in part from unfamiliarity with the dataset. The most important thereof is that participants were not censored after reaching the main outcome of virological failure, and that many “determinants” (or rather, correlates) of ever having had virological failure were assessed at the time of data download/analysis. Thus, described “determinants” may have occurred only after the virological failure, which is not immediately apparent in the way the results are reported.

As verifying the validity of published work is core to the integrity of the scholarly record, the authors requested to retract the article and the Editor and Publisher agreed with this decision.

We have been informed in our decision-making by our editorial policies and COPE guidelines.

The retracted article will remain online to maintain the scholarly record, but it will be digitally watermarked on each page as ‘Retracted’.