Doctors Recommend A New Drug For The Prevention Of HIV Infection

Doctors Recommend A New Drug For The Prevention Of HIV Infection.
Should society in peril of contracting HIV because they have chancy f__king to go a pill to prevent infection, or will the medication inspirit them to take even more sexual risks? After years of cogitation on this question, a new international survey suggests the medication doesn't lead relatives to stop using condoms or have more sex with more people. The on isn't definitive, and it hasn't changed the thoughts of every expert discount human growth hormones pills. But one of the study's co-authors said the findings substructure the drug's use as a particular to prevent infection with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

And "People may have more partners or cut using condoms, but as well as we can tell, it's not because of taking the slip to prevent HIV infection ," said memorize co-author Dr Robert Grant, a older investigator with the Gladstone Institute of Virology and Immunology in San Francisco. The medication in dubiousness is called Truvada, which combines the drugs emtricitabine and tenofovir vigrx. It's normally hand-me-down to investigate mobile vulgus who are infected with HIV, but check out - in bright and bisexual men and in straight couples with one infected accomplice - have shown that it can lower the risk of infection in ladies and gentlemen who become exposed to the virus through sex.

However, it does not bump off the risk of infection. The US Food and Drug Administration approved the medication for bar purposes in 2012. Few people seem to be taking it for control purposes, however. Its manufacturer, Gilead, has disclosed that about 1700 bodies are taking the drug for that explanation in the United States. In the new study, researchers found that expected rates of HIV and syphilis infection decreased in almost 2500 men and transgender women when they took Truvada.

The library participants, who all faced apex danger 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 non-functioning placebo. Those who believed they were taking Truvada "were just as dependable as everybody else," Grant said, suggesting that they weren't more liable to to restrain using condoms or be more wanton because they believed they had unused shield against HIV infection.

Grant said the intention of the workroom allows scientists to better understand the choices that participants make. The burn the midnight oil is limited, however, because the researchers recruited participants as an alternative of waiting for grass roots to come to them. For that reason, it's unsolvable to know if people will seek out Truvada to be involved new levels of risk by, say, no longer using condoms. There are many skeptics, including the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, who fears that the downer will absolutely onward people to make out riskier decisions in regard to sex.

One of these skeptics is Arleen Leibowitz, a professor emeritus of exposed practice at the Luskin School of Public Affairs at the University of California, Los Angeles. She said the den shows that many plebeians failed to pocket Truvada as prescribed and often didn't appropriate enough to be protected from HIV. That raises the vista that some people would take risks because they believe they're protected when they in actuality aren't.

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

For the prominence the drug may be appropriate for some patients who paucity protection from HIV, but doctors should be cautious and metamorphose sure their patients take the medication. The haunt is published in the Dec 18, 2013 online issue of the journal PLoS One muscle. In other HIV/AIDS news, a unfamiliar look - also published in PLoS One - reports that 20-year-old men infected with HIV in the United States and Canada can look for to lodge almost as extended as the general population and make it, typically, to their ahead 70s.