Use of HIV Pill for Prevention Appears Safe in Early Tests
The recently ended 2010 International AIDS Conference (IAC) in Vienna, Austria, provided some very welcome news on the development of HIV prevention technologies. AIDS Action’s Ashley Smith has already blogged about an important breakthrough in microbicide research. I also want to draw your attention to the promising – but still early – results of a study involving another prevention approach known as pre-exposure prophylaxis or PrEP.
The idea behind PrEP is to give uninfected persons HIV medications to keep them from becoming infected with the virus. At the IAC, researchers reported on a PrEP study involving nearly 400 gay and bisexual men from Boston, Atlanta, and San Francisco. The study team, which included researchers from Fenway Health, found that once-daily dosing of the HIV drug tenofovir appeared to be safe in uninfected men. Additional research is now under way to learn whether tenofovir is actually effective in reducing HIV transmission. (Read on …)
