Healthy people at risk for HIV are advised to take daily antiretroviral pills that cut the odds of infection by more than 90 percent, according to U.S. health officials.
The groups who are urged to take Truvada include those involved with HIV-infected partners, those who inject illicit drugs and share equipment, or who’ve been in treatment programs for injection medicine use, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday in a statement.
It is also advised that heterosexual men and women who do not always use condoms and gay or bisexual men who have sex without condoms or who are in open relationships consider using the pill as well. Gilead Sciences Inc.’s anti-AIDS pill Truvada, was approved in July of 2012 by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as the first drug to prevent the virus which causes AIDS. It was originally approved as a treatment for people already infected with HIV in 2004.
For HIV, “there’s no vaccine and cure in the near horizon. Prevention is key,” Jonathan Mermin, director of the CDC’s national center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB prevention, said in a telephone interview.
PrEP, also known as pre-exposure prophylaxis, a prevention measure which involves at-risk individuals take daily doses of an antiretroviral drug like Truvada is a step in the right direction towards combating the AIDS epidemic, which infects 50,000 new patients each year in the U.S. alone. It is a tool which, along with safe sex practices and regular HIV testing, helps lower the risk of infection.
This CDC endorsement is the first time a government agency has officially endorsed such a medicine as part of the PrEP strategy. While the drug costs about $15,000 a year in the U.S., it is not necessarily covered by insurance.
The new advancement is met with critique from some health care organizations including The AIDS Healthcare Foundation, a Los Angeles-based non-profit that provides medical care to over than 300,000 patients. The AHF says that they are in opposition of the recommendation of Truvada without the use of a condom because it does not prevent 100% of other sexually transmitted diseases. “This is a position I fear the CDC will come to regret,” said AHF president Michael Weinstein in a statement.
Although an advocate of the drug, Princy Kumar, Professor of Medicine and Microbiology at Georgetown University and Chief of Infectious Diseases at Washington’s MedStar Georgetown University Hospital, says “it is not a magic pill” and that the pill works best when taken daily and in conjunction with “safe sex practices and consistent health counseling.”