South Africa has a national HIV-1 prevalence of 12.2% and due to the large population size of 52.9 million, this equates to a 6.5 million people living with HIV-1. The high HIV-1 prevalence has warranted the scaling up of the national antiretroviral treatment program with over 2 million people accessing treatment since 2012. The population of South Africa is genetically diverse and consists of South African Black (SAB), South African Mixed ancestry (SAM), South African Caucasian (SAC) and South African Indian (SAI) populations that constitute 79.8%, 9.0%, 8.7% and 2.5% of the total population. The reasons for the disproportionate HIV-1 prevalence rates estimated for the different populations (15.0%, 3.1%, 0.3% and 0.8% for the SAB, SAM, SAC and SAI populations, respectively) are unknown; however, host genetic differences may be a contributory factor. Human leukocyte antigen (HLA) class I genes play a crucial role in the antiviral innate and adaptive immune response, since HLA class I proteins present antigenic peptides to CD8+ Cytotoxic T cells (CTLs) of the adaptive immune system and are also involved in the innate immune response via interaction with killer-cell immunoglobulin-like receptors (KIRs) expressed by Natural Killer cells (NK cells)
