Doctors Recommend A New Drug For The Prevention Of HIV Infection

Doctors Recommend A New Drug For The Prevention Of HIV Infection.
Should hoi polloi in threat of contracting HIV because they have precarious sex away a pill to prevent infection, or will the medication encourage them to take even more animal risks? After years of debate on this question, a new supranational study suggests the medication doesn't lead mobile vulgus to stop using condoms or have more sex with more people. The research isn't definitive, and it hasn't changed the babysit of every expert herbala xyz. But one of the study's co-authors said the findings keep the drug's use as a sense to prevent infection with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

And "People may have more partners or stoppage using condoms, but as well as we can tell, it's not because of taking the drug to slow HIV infection ," said study co-author Dr Robert Grant, a chief investigator with the Gladstone Institute of Virology and Immunology in San Francisco. The medication in mistrust is called Truvada, which combines the drugs emtricitabine and tenofovir. It's normally cast-off to criticize people who are infected with HIV, but study - in gay and bisexual men and in straight couples with one infected sharer - have shown that it can lower the risk of infection in folk 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 treatment for slowing purposes in 2012. Few people seem to be taking it for preclusion purposes, however. Its manufacturer, Gilead, has disclosed that about 1700 population are taking the drug for that reason in the United States. In the altered study, researchers found that expected rates of HIV and syphilis infection decreased in almost 2500 men and transgender women when they took Truvada.

The deliberate over participants, who all faced consequential 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 out of a job placebo. Those who believed they were taking Truvada "were just as timely as each and every one else," Grant said, suggesting that they weren't more odds-on to come to a stop using condoms or be more dissipated because they believed they had extra protection against HIV infection.

Grant said the aim of the study allows scientists to better understand the choices that participants make. The contemplate is limited, however, because the researchers recruited participants a substitute of waiting for people to come to them. For that reason, it's unattainable to know if people will seek out Truvada to experience new levels of risk by, say, no longer using condoms. There are many skeptics, including the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, who fears that the opiate will distinctly encourage people to mould riskier decisions in regard to sex.

One of these skeptics is Arleen Leibowitz, a professor emeritus of patrons policy at the Luskin School of Public Affairs at the University of California, Los Angeles. She said the investigate shows that many kinsfolk failed to take Truvada as prescribed and often didn't adopt enough to be protected from HIV. That raises the expectation that some people would take risks because they believe they're protected when they truly aren't.

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

For the moment the drug may be appropriate for some patients who poverty protection from HIV, but doctors should be cautious and organize sure their patients take the medication. The study is published in the Dec 18, 2013 online copy of the journal PLoS One gambar. In other HIV/AIDS news, a young work - also published in PLoS One - reports that 20-year-old men infected with HIV in the United States and Canada can watch to animate almost as long as the general population and make it, typically, to their at 70s.