Study suggests a pill that could keep you HIV free

San Francisco’s largest private health insurer, Kaiser Permanente announced on Wednesday that none of its 657 clients who received a certain drug had become infected over a period of more than two years by HIV. The study was published in Clinical Infectious diseases and aimed at demonstrating that a daily pill to prevent HIV infection can work in the real world. The outcome surprised many experts who previously believed that the pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, would lead to a less use of condoms and an increased number of HIV infections. The study found that when these people were on the drug, PrEP, almost all of whom were gay men, many of them contracted several other venereal diseases but none of them got HIV.

Although there are ways to control the virus with antiretroviral drugs but the fact that HIV cannot be cured with the help of any antibiotics or medicine makes it very dangerous. Dr. Jonathan E. Volk, an epidemiologist for the insurer, Kaiser Permanente said,” This is very reassuring data. It tells us that PrEP works even in a high-risk population.”

Observational studies like this are not considered to be scientifically rigorous but Dr. Volk and his colleagues followed a large number of men engaged in very risky behavior from mid-2012, when the Food and Drug Administration approved the use of two-drug combination called Truvada for prevention of the HIV infection. The study had enough participants as about a third of all San Franciscans with private health insurance use Kaiser Permanente, which has its own hospitals, doctors and pharmacies and tracks all of its patients in one electronic record system. The study had 653 participants as gay men out of the total 657 and 84 per cent of them reported multiple sexual partners.

After starting PrEP, half of the men became infected with syphilis, gonorrhea or chlamydia within a year. After the participants had six months ofPrEP use, Dr. Volk’s team surveyed 143 about their sexual behavior. More than 40 per cent of the people reported that their use of condoms had decreased. A majority of 74 per cent said that their number of sexual partners had remained the same. A number of previous studies also suggest that PrEP is highly effective at preventing infection when participants take all or most of their daily pills. The researchers did not take any blood samples as it was presumed that the clients took their Truvada regularly since they asked their primary care doctors for it.