HIV prevention pill

PrEP is well-suited to block HIV, but with increasing use it is also feared that people are sexually ill-advised and spread other sexually transmitted infections. The researchers believe, however, that the opposite could be the case.

On a bright blue morning in California, ambulance is passing through Castro Street in San Francisco. A small rainbow flag flies from the antenna while the speakers sound:

Young man, you do not have to feel depressed!

Two days before one of the largest Gay Pride parades in the United States, almost everything was covered in sight with rainbow flags. And balloons And the flag.

Young and old men have started to enter the city's largest sexual health clinic, Magnet at Strut, while a free counseling service at the University of California, San Francisco, about two miles east, is taking place from calls to health care providers in the Bay Area flooded. Many desperately want their patients to start taking the same blue pill before the weekend celebrations cause a wave of problems.

It is not the little blue pill you could think of. This is Truvada, the brand of a daily pill for HIV prevention known as Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis or PrEP.

Originally, the combination of two drugs was formulated as a virus-suppressive therapy for HIV-positive people, but clinical studies indicate that it primarily blocks the retention of the virus in the first place. In 2012, the US Food and Drug Administration UU granted additional approval as a preventive medicine and expanded its use in May 2018 to include vulnerable adolescents.

After a slow start, Truvada is gaining popularity across the world with men having sex with men. Although good numbers are missing, it is believed that San Francisco has the world's largest acceptance. There, the rate of new HIV infections fell by about half between 2012 and 2016, mainly due to more testing, better use of HIV-infected people and PrEP.

City by city, public health officials and doctors have started to thank PrEP for drastically reducing HIV transmission rates. In New York, Chicago, London, Sydney, Melbourne. All this despite some huge barriers to access and a continuing violent reaction, especially from other homosexual and bisexual men.

Critics have said that PrEP is a "party drug" for people who want to have higher-risk sex but cannot assume they are taking the pills responsibly.

This is the "boutique intervention" that is used by only a few.

It is going to lead to HIV, which is more resistant to drugs.

It is going to make "satisfied" men give up condoms in bulk and increase the prices of other STIs.

It will lead to a gonorrhea that is more resistant to antibiotics and, according to your example, can contribute to syphilis and other infections.

In 2012, HIV activist David Duran coined the term "Truvada whore" to destroy PrEP as an approach to the "insecure practices" of other gay men and as a likely contribution to the spread of other sexually transmitted diseases. In their defiant reaction, the PrEP supporters wore "Truvada Whore" shirts. Since then, Duran has said that his "shameful" and "ignorant" attitudes have changed and he now adopts the prevention strategy. However, the assumption that PrEP has encouraged gay and bisexual men to renounce condoms and promote the recent increase in other sexually transmitted diseases is so prevalent that a recent New York Times member asked the question of whether or not it was Arrival of the pill announced "the end of a safe homosexual". Sex "

Even homosexual publications have categorized the increase in "negative illnesses" of other PrEP STIs, while researchers have complained of a "failure" in relation to safer sex news.

What happens if this shared narrative is not entirely correct?

What does the PrEP gap generally say about the deep-rooted tension between scientific progress and moral judgments about sex?

Most importantly, today's public health campaigns can overcome more than three decades of anxiety with effective prevention messages that promote fearless sex.

The suspected links between PrEP and STI, whether positive or negative, have been controversial so far.

It is true that PrEP alone does not prevent STI beyond HIV. Both Gilead Sciences, the manufacturer of Truvada