The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention intends to drastically increase access to HIV prevention medication.
According to the agency, doctors should openly discuss HIV prevention medications with all sexually active persons and offer these medications, known as pre-exposure prophylaxis or PrEP, to anybody who requests them.
The CDC updated its guidelines on Wednesday, hoping that these discussions may encourage more people to protect themselves from HIV.
The objective, according to Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, director of the CDC's Division of HIV Prevention, is also to make the drug available to those who may be unwilling to divulge potentially stigmatizing behavior that puts them at risk.
"Stigma is our biggest enemy," Daskalakis said. "I really think this puts PrEP in the same place as so many other really good preventive interventions like talking about smoking, alcohol, drugs, etc."
According to the CDC, PrEP reduces the risk of contracting HIV through intercourse by around 99% when used as directed, with little adverse effects. According to the CDC, just a quarter of those who potentially benefit from the treatment were taking it in 2020.
To expand such options, the guidelines also highlight new treatments recently approved by the Food and Drug Administration, as well as several that are awaiting FDA approval.
If you have an HIV-positive sexual partner, have sex but don't use a condom consistently, or have been diagnosed with a sexually transmitted disease in the last six months, the CDC recommends that you explore PrEP. It's also a good idea for persons who share needles to inject drugs or have an HIV-positive injection partner.
The CDC predicts that 34,800 individuals in the United States were diagnosed with HIV in 2019, the most recent year for which data is available. The human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, can lead to AIDS if left untreated.
The number of new HIV infections has decreased marginally over the last four years, but the cases are not uniformly distributed, and some groups, such as people of color, gay, bisexual, and other males who have sex with men, are receiving a disproportionate number of new HIV diagnoses.
Truvada and Descovy are PrEP pill forms that must be taken daily for at least a week to be fully effective, but there may be another choice on the horizon for individuals who don't want to take a daily pill.
Cabotegravir is an injectable medicine that has been demonstrated to be effective in clinical trials for HIV prevention and is awaiting FDA approval for use as PrEP. It would only need to be injected once every two months if it were approved.
"Expanding access to PrEP will be critical to ending the HIV epidemic in the United States," the CDC wrote.
