[LINK] "With a little pill, could one city’s AIDS epidemic be ending?"
Ariana Eunjung Cha's Washington Post article suggests--plausibly--that the mass uptake of PrEP in San Francisco may mean that future HIV transmissions will stop in that city. There's something fitting to this, inasmuch as AIDS was first identified in this centre.
On online dating sites, Matthew Sachs identifies himself as a 5-foot-8, 130-pound grad student who likes hiking, performance art and community service. He says he’s interested in meeting a broad range of guys, from jocks to geeks, and notes that - oh, by the way - he’s “On PrEP.”
Those four letters stand for a daily medical regimen in which healthy individuals take a blue oval pill to lower their risk of becoming infected with HIV. The treatment, known as pre-exposure prophylaxis, has become so common in the Bay Area’s gay community that it’s frequently mentioned in social media profiles from Facebook to Scruff.
Since the first breakthrough research was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2010, the once-a-day dose of Truvada has consistently been shown to reduce the risk of HIV infection by as much as 90 percent. The results of the most recent study, which was published in September, were even more encouraging: Not one of the 600 people taking the drug became infected over two years.
As many as 10,000 San Franciscans could now be on PrEP, according to one city official’s estimate. The treatment has been transformative here, not just in medical terms but in how it has changed the nature of dating, love and relationships between those who are HIV-positive and those who aren’t. And it has prompted some AIDS experts to consider something that would have been unfathomable during the dark days of the 1980s: Could the nation’s onetime epicenter of HIV/AIDS be the place where the epidemic that has so haunted Americans begins to come to an end?
Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is one of the believers. It’s “very realistic,” he said, that San Francisco might see new HIV infections cease in several years. But the rest of the country will be more challenging, he said.
On online dating sites, Matthew Sachs identifies himself as a 5-foot-8, 130-pound grad student who likes hiking, performance art and community service. He says he’s interested in meeting a broad range of guys, from jocks to geeks, and notes that - oh, by the way - he’s “On PrEP.”
Those four letters stand for a daily medical regimen in which healthy individuals take a blue oval pill to lower their risk of becoming infected with HIV. The treatment, known as pre-exposure prophylaxis, has become so common in the Bay Area’s gay community that it’s frequently mentioned in social media profiles from Facebook to Scruff.
Since the first breakthrough research was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2010, the once-a-day dose of Truvada has consistently been shown to reduce the risk of HIV infection by as much as 90 percent. The results of the most recent study, which was published in September, were even more encouraging: Not one of the 600 people taking the drug became infected over two years.
As many as 10,000 San Franciscans could now be on PrEP, according to one city official’s estimate. The treatment has been transformative here, not just in medical terms but in how it has changed the nature of dating, love and relationships between those who are HIV-positive and those who aren’t. And it has prompted some AIDS experts to consider something that would have been unfathomable during the dark days of the 1980s: Could the nation’s onetime epicenter of HIV/AIDS be the place where the epidemic that has so haunted Americans begins to come to an end?
Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is one of the believers. It’s “very realistic,” he said, that San Francisco might see new HIV infections cease in several years. But the rest of the country will be more challenging, he said.