WHY IS NO ONE ON THE FIRST TREATMENT TO PREVENT H.I.V.?

[xchrom]

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/10/the-battle-over-truvada-and-the-first-treatment-to-prevent-hiv.html



In November, 2010, the New England Journal of Medicine published the results of a three-year clinical trial, funded by the National Institutes of Health, announcing the arrival of a treatment that could reduce the risk of contracting H.I.V. by more than ninety per cent. The treatment involved a blue, oval pill containing emtricitabine and tenofovir. Marketed under the brand name Truvada, the pill was synthesized in 2004 by Gilead Sciences, the world’s largest producer of branded H.I.V. drugs, and has been used in combination with other antiretrovirals as a primary treatment for people living with AIDS. The N.I.H. team discovered that a daily dose of Truvada not only suppressed the virus in people who were already infected but also prevented healthy people from contracting H.I.V. in the first place. Following the N.I.H. study, which tracked gay men in Peru, Ecuador, Brazil, South Africa, Thailand, and the United States, additional trials showed the drug to be effective for heterosexual men and women, as well as for injection-drug users. Researchers called the treatment “pre-exposure prophylaxis,” or PrEP for short. Others have called it “the new condom.”

On the day the N.I.H. announced the results of the PrEP study, the research team received a congratulatory phone call from President Obama. Shortly thereafter, Time put PrEP in the first slot on its list of the year’s top medical innovations. Dr. Robert Grant, a professor at the University of California San Francisco and the N.I.H. study’s lead scientist, braced for a stampede. He told me, “The evening before we announced, we had meetings with the leadership of public health in California, and they were thinking, as we were, that there was going to be a rush, that everyone was going to descend on the clinics.” The Centers for Disease Control issued interim usage guidelines, despite the fact that the treatment was more than a year away from formal F.D.A. approval. The C.D.C. knew that some doctors were already prescribing Truvada for prevention off-label, and it expected more to follow suit.

But, in fact, adoption of the drug has been slow. According to Dawn Smith, a biomedical interventions implementation officer in the C.D.C.’s epidemiology branch, at least half a million Americans are good candidates for PrEP—meaning that they are at high risk for contracting H.I.V. through sexual activity—yet only a few thousand Americans are receiving the treatment. “As in most fields, many clinicians don’t want to be the first one out of the gate,” Smith said. Salim Karim, the chair of United Nations’ AIDS Scientific Expert Panel and the director of the Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa, thinks that doctors’ hesitance may not have anything to do with sexual health. “Clinicians fundamentally have difficulty giving healthy people drugs,” he said. “This is not unique to H.I.V.” Meanwhile, despite repeated demonstrations that Truvada provides protection from H.I.V., an estimated hundred and fifty thousand Americans, more than a third of whom are in their teens and twenties, have become infected with the virus since the results of the study were released.

The medical community’s reluctance to prescribe Truvada—and patients’ reluctance to request it—also stems from a bitter fight over the treatment. Critics have questioned PrEP’s safety, efficacy, and cost, and accusing the government of colluding with the drug manufacturer at the expense of public health. Regan Hofmann, the former editor-in-chief of Poz, a magazine for people living with AIDS, called PrEP a “profit-driven sex toy for rich Westerners.” Michael Weinstein, the head of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation (A.H.F.), the world’s largest AIDS organization and the primary-care provider for more than two hundred thousand patients around the world, predicted a public-health catastrophe. “The applause for this approach shows just how disposable we consider the lives of gay men,” he wrote. When I interviewed Weinstein, he claimed the studies were “rigged” and that PrEP was essentially a plot by Gilead to force young people into buying unnecessary medication, and that it was going badly because A.H.F. wasn’t letting the company get away with it.

[pipoman]

1. I.V. drug users and people

partaking in risky sex likely don't have the money nor the inclination to take such a drug.

[Turbineguy]

2. They cost about $25 per pill.