Just before “Treatment as Prevention” hit the headlines with some controversy, PrEP or Pre Exposure Prophylaxis, was on everybody’s lips.

PrEP is an experimental approach that would use antiretroviral medications (ARVs, which are normally used to treat people living with HIV) to reduce the risk of HIV infection in HIV-negative people. In this intervention, HIV-negative people would take a single drug or a combination of drugs with the hope that it would lower their risk of infection if exposed to HIV. PrEP trials are ongoing around the world. (Source: AVAC)

Whilst some …

Treatment as a means to prevent HIV infection has hit the media following a declaration by Brian Williams, professor of epidemiology at the South African Centre for Epidemiological Modelling and Analysis in Stellenbosch, at the AAAS in San Diego.
Whilst the HIV epidemic has shown some signs of stabilisation in the recent years, more than 7,000 people are still infected every day with the virus that causes AIDS.
Despite interesting results of a vaccine trial in Thailand, prevention is still limited to a small number of options many of which are not …

The largest clinical trial of anti-retroviral therapy (ART) for people with HIV infection ever run in Africa has found that regular laboratory tests offer little additional clinical benefit to populations when compared to careful clinical monitoring.
The DART study was a controversial one that saw mislead and misleading activists trying to stop a study which outcome could contribute to save many lives.
The study published in The Lancet today concluded that “ART can be delivered safely without routine laboratory monitoring for toxic eff ects, but diff erences in disease progression suggest a …

Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) is an  experimental HIV-prevention strategy that proposes using antiretrovirals (ARVs) to reduce the risk of HIV infection in healthy uninfected people at risk of acquiring the virus. PrEP is not proven to work and is currently being tested in HIV-negative people in several clinical trials across the world.  It is a controversial strategy that raises many hopes but also many questions.
For further information check the PrEPWatch Website.

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The pontifical position on condom, based on ignorance, fallacy and a struggle of the Church to survive, as well as the response of the scientific community and activists are well known and documented (search this blog for some examples of both). But in a “Reflection” to be published in The lancet Samuel Ponce de Leon and colleagues add more weight to the argument that condoms are an essential tool in the fight against HIV in the future: evolution.

Now evolution is something the Church is also in denial about despite the …