Doctors Recommend A New Drug For The Prevention Of HIV Infection

Doctors Recommend A New Drug For The Prevention Of HIV Infection.
Should bodies in hazard of contracting HIV because they have risky sex rent a pill to prevent infection, or will the medication encourage them to take even more sexual risks? After years of deliberation on this question, a new international study suggests the medication doesn't lead relatives to stop using condoms or have more sex with more people. The research isn't definitive, and it hasn't changed the intention of every expert. But one of the study's co-authors said the findings support the drug's use as a method to prevent infection with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

And "People may have more partners or stop using condoms, but as well as we can tell, it's not because of taking the cure-all to prevent HIV infection ," said study co-author Dr Robert Grant, a elder investigator with the Gladstone Institute of Virology and Immunology in San Francisco. The medication in dispute is called Truvada, which combines the drugs emtricitabine and tenofovir. It's normally Euphemistic pre-owned to treat people who are infected with HIV, but research - in garish and bisexual men and in straight couples with one infected partner - have shown that it can lower the risk of infection in grass roots who become exposed to the virus through sex.

However, it does not eliminate the risk of infection. The US Food and Drug Administration approved the medicine for prevention purposes in 2012. Few people seem to be taking it for control purposes, however. Its manufacturer, Gilead, has disclosed that about 1700 people are taking the drug for that sense in the United States, Grant said. In the new study, researchers found that expected rates of HIV and syphilis infection decreased in almost 2500 men and transgender women when they took Truvada.

The turn over participants, who all faced lofty risk of HIV infection, were recruited in Peru, Ecuador, South Africa, Brazil, Thailand and the United States. Some of the participants took Truvada while others took an idle placebo. Those who believed they were taking Truvada "were just as right as all else," Grant said, suggesting that they weren't more likely to stop using condoms or be more promiscuous because they believed they had amazingly protection against HIV infection.

Grant said the design of the study allows scientists to better discern the choices that participants make. The study is limited, however, because the researchers recruited participants as an alternative of waiting for people to come to them. For that reason, it's impossible to know if commoners will seek out Truvada to take new levels of risk by, say, no longer using condoms. There are many skeptics, including the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, who fears that the sedate will simply cheer people to make riskier decisions in regard to sex.

One of these skeptics is Arleen Leibowitz, a professor emeritus of plain policy at the Luskin School of Public Affairs at the University of California, Los Angeles. She said the survey shows that many people failed to take Truvada as prescribed and often didn't feel enough to be protected from HIV. That raises the prospect that some people would take risks because they think they're protected when they actually aren't, she noted.

Leibowitz also said some of the statistics in the study are arguable because they don't include enough participants. And she said the participants may have lied about their sex lives to gratify the people who interviewed them. "We'll learn a lot when its use becomes more general. But it's woebegone to do experiments on the general population".

For the moment, she said, the drug may be appropriate for some patients who need screen from HIV, but doctors should be cautious and make sure their patients take the medication. The contemplate is published in the Dec 18, 2013 online edition of the journal PLoS One drugs purchase. In other HIV/AIDS news, a experimental study - also published in PLoS One - reports that 20-year-old men infected with HIV in the United States and Canada can ahead to to live almost as want as the general population and make it, typically, to their early 70s.