The medication Truvada, the most used PrEP medication.

Joanne Stekler nevertheless recalls the time a colleague rushed into her workplace in the Duke University class of Medicine, exclaiming, “Oh, my gosh! Perhaps you have seen this information about HIV cocktails?”

It absolutely was the mid ‘90s, and their group ended up being investigating HIV transmission and therapy “talking about intercourse, medications and stone ’n’ roll each day,” she recalls.

Fleetingly thereafter, a brand new class of antiretroviral medications started to sharply reduce HIV-related fatalities. Referred to as extremely active therapy that is antiretroviral or HAART, the medication protocol ended up being an important breakthrough and maybe the biggest switching point within the epidemic since the identification of this virus. In just many years, HIV went from being a death phrase up to a workable condition.

Today, Stekler is a professor that is associate the Department of Medicine during the University of Washington and her attention has become dedicated to another promising brand new medication regimen: Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis, also called PrEP.

Much like birth prevention, PrEP comes with a pill that is dailydispensed beneath the trade name Truvada) taken by way of a HIV-negative individual, frequently in conjunction with regular hospital visits for assessment and guidance. Whenever precisely utilized, it may almost totally avoid the transmission of HIV. Truvada happens to be marketed towards the male that is gay because, in this country, homosexual males continue to have the greatest rates of HIV. This avoidance measure has generated extreme alterations in the intimate tradition in a lot of the community that is gay.