Truvada pill urged for AIDS prevention after promising studies
As the U.S. Food and Drug Administrationweighs approval of a radical new method of AIDS prevention — a prescription pill taken once a day — advocates say the results of experimental trials in sub-Saharan Africa argue strongly for the drug's adoption in the United States.
The pill was developed to treat people already infected with HIV. But studies published Wednesday by the New England Journal of Medicine demonstrate that it can also prevent heterosexual transmission of HIV, the most common mode of contagion in Africa.
A growing number of doctors in the U.S. are already prescribing the drug to uninfected high-risk patients as an off-label use, and some insurers are covering the considerable expense.
"It's not officially monitored, but its use is on the rise," said Dr. Robert M. Grant of UC San Francisco's Gladstone Institute of Virology and Immunology, who worked on one of the new studies. "We're already starting to see support groups for users."
http://www.latimes.com/health/la-sci-hiv-prevention-20120712,0,3763131.story
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