With a little pill, could one city’s AIDS epidemic be ending?

wapo ^ | Jan 29, 2016 | Ariana Eunjung Cha

[upchuck]

SAN FRANCISCO — 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.

snip

Fears of the drug’s possible side effects are hampering such efforts, as is the stigma of being a “Truvada whore” associated with HIV or risky behaviors, public health officials say. There are also the lingering worries, expressed most vocally by Michael Weinstein of the Los Angeles-based AIDS Healthcare Foundation, that PrEP could backfire. The internationally known activist said that he is troubled that some people are using it as a “party drug,” not taking it regularly or buying it on the black market as a way to justify not using condoms — which makes the spread of other sexually transmitted diseases more likely.

[upchuck]

100% guaranteed way to avoid ALL STDs, don't be a queer.

[Chode]

FDRQ delenda est...

[Awgie]

Disgusting and depressing. Who are these people? What are they thinking? Imagine getting up each day focused and obsessed on the act of sodomy. Imagine being preoccupied with sharing your body cavities with strangers and casual acquaintances in public, semi private and private venues. Imagine proactively and in a pre meditated fashion consuming toxic and untested chemicals designed to reduce the risk of life altering/ending disease contracted from acting on your obsessive perversions.

America is lost, and one of the markers us the protection of perversion and mental illness know as homosexuality.

[2nd Amendment]

One little reading of the Bible could do a better job!

[Tax-chick]

Wrong. If you want to avoid all STDs, don’t have sex with an infected person of either sex.

[CGASMIA68]

don’t be a queer

wrong don’t have sex

[IronJack]

Having failed to learn any lesson from the contraceptive Pill, sexual deviants now introduce a Pill for queers. I’m sure there will be no social repercussions.

Another example of how our technology has vastly outrun our morality.

[Redleg Duke]

These “people” are part of a long-range mission to undermine the morals and values of this blessed republic.

[exPBRrat]

HUH, I interpret that drug breakthrough as just another sign of the approaching apocalypse.

[so_real]

And what you just described is the "new normal". It is to be celebrated and taught to the youth. These people are "born that way". So very pathetic ... the inmates run the asylum ... the sick are curing the healthy.

[B212]

addiction to sex....same area of the brain as religion stimulates/lights up

[Mrs. Don-o]

Dear Chuck: Actually, it's not "being a queer" that causes the transmission of STD's. The big risk factors are needle drugs and/or sex with more than one partner, no matter what your "orientation" is. Straights too, my friend.

Remain a virgin until marriage, then marry a virgin and be faithful, AND don't do IV drugs. Then you won't catch STD's including HIV. It's that simple.

[Mrs. Don-o]

Don’t have sex with anyone but your faithful uninfected spouse.

[Tax-chick]

And don’t inject drugs with needles used by infected persons.

[i_robot73]

Don’t forget to stock your own blood. The full ‘blood donations open to ALL’ is quietly lurking around the corner.

Any transfusion thereafter is going to be like Russian roulette.

[Trillian]

Not if they keep buggering each other.

[Blue Collar Christian]

If the pill was saltpeter...