In their defiant response, PrEP supporters began wearing “Truvada whore” T-shirts. In 2012, HIV campaigner and writer David Duran coined the phrase “Truvada whore”, to blast PrEP as a gateway to “unsafe practices” by other gay men and as a likely contributor to the spread of other STIs. It will lead to more antibiotic-resistant gonorrhoea and could contribute to syphilis and other infections following suit. It will cause “complacent” men to abandon condoms en masse and drive up rates of other STIs. It is a “boutique intervention” that will only be used by the few. PrEP is a “party drug” for people who want to have riskier sex but who can’t be expected to take the pills responsibly, critics have said.
All this is in spite of some formidable barriers to access and an ongoing backlash – especially from other gay and bisexual men. In New York, Chicago, London, Sydney, Melbourne. In city after city, public health officials and doctors have begun crediting PrEP with helping to dramatically reduce HIV transmission rates. There, the rate of new HIV infections roughly halved between 20, attributed largely to more testing, better use of treatment to make people with HIV uninfectious, and PrEP.
Although good numbers are lacking, San Francisco is widely believed to have the highest uptake in the world. In 2012 the US Food and Drug Administration gave it additional approval as a preventive drug, further expanding its use in May 2018 to include at-risk adolescents.Īfter a slow start, Truvada is surging in popularity around the world among men who have sex with men. The two-drug combination was originally formulated as a virus-suppressing therapy for HIV-positive people, but clinical trials later suggested it was also effective at blocking the virus from taking hold in the first place.