5,000 Cumulative Years of PrEP Use and No HIV Infections

[Jim Allen]

Not exactly scientific news but interesting perhaps for people using PrEP or considering it.

Full story:
https://www.poz.com/article/5000-cumulative-years-prep-use-hiv-infections
August 22, 2017

5,000 Cumulative Years of PrEP Use and No HIV Infections

Not satisfied with its success, health care group Kaiser Permanente looks to address those who stop or only consider PrEP and contract HIV.

One major health care provider in Northern California (KPNC) boasts sterling success in its sprawling Truvada (tenofovir disoproxil fumarate/emtricitabine) as pre-exposure prophylaxis program, with more than 5,000 cumulative years of PrEP use among its members since 2012 and not one new case of HIV among them. But clinicians and researchers at Kaiser Permanente Northern California still aren’t satisfied and are imploring others in the field to broaden their definition of the term “PrEP failure.”

Over the past 18 months, there have been three documented cases of individuals, all men who have sex with men (MSM), contracting HIV while they were adhering well to the daily PrEP regimen according to multiple sources of evidence. (Two of the men contracted rare, drug-resistant strains of the virus that apparently evaded the pair of antiretrovirals in Truvada; the other had an extraordinarily high level of sexual risk taking.)