The good news is that it appears a lot of people are enjoying safe sex, even if they are HIV positive. There’s an 18 percent drop in HIV infections in recent years, according to federal health figures.
The bad news is the feds attributed the good news almost exclusively to medical treatment and pretty much ignored the benefits of condoms, according to the world’s largest AIDS organization.
AIDS Healthcare Foundation welcomed the news of an 18 percent decline in HIV infections in the United States between 2008 and 2014, but it is questioning some of the conclusions drawn by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials regarding the role of pre-exposure prophylaxis in particular, in the decline.
“In addition, AHF chastised the CDC for overlooking the role that condoms may have played in the decline and blasted the organization for failing to even mention or include condom use in the roll out, and as part of its new ‘HIP’ (High-impact Prevention) approach to HIV prevention, which includes HIV testing, treatment-as-prevention, needle exchange and PrEP, but no mention of condoms,” according to AIDS Healthcare.
“CDC officials rightly tagged treatment-as-prevention as a likely contributor to the welcome decline in infections,” AIDS Healthcare said, noting:
“CDC researchers believe the declines in annual HIV infections are due, in large part, to efforts to increase the number of people living with HIV who know their HIV status and are virally suppressed — meaning their HIV infection is under control through effective treatment. This is a top public health priority. Studies have shown that, in addition to improving the health of people living with HIV, early treatment with antiretroviral medications dramatically reduces a person’s risk of transmitting the virus to others.”
But AIDS Health care said the CDC is “on far shakier ground when it claimed, ‘Increases in the use of pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, may also have played a role in preventing new infections in recent years.'”
AIDS Healthcare said that PrEP was only available for “less than two of the six years studied and which very few people were actually on during that time period.
“In addition, the population initially targeted for PrEP use, gay and bisexual men, ‘…did not experience an overall decline in annual HIV infections from 2008 to 2014,'” according to a CDC press release. “Instead, the steepest declines in HIV infections were found in injection drug users (56 percent) and heterosexuals (36 percent), populations not targeted or prioritized for PrEP.”
“We are glad that HIV infections are down 18 percent overall in the six year period studied. However, STDs are skyrocketing around the country today, particularly among young people and men who have sex with men,” said AHF President Michael Weinstein. “Unfortunately, individual and organizational complacency has set in at the CDC and elsewhere regarding condoms, which remain the best way to prevent most STDs, including HIV. So it was disappointing, but not surprising that the CDC failed to mention or include condoms as part of its new prevention effort … Inexplicably the new CDC effort again excludes condoms, which cost pennies and also prevent other STDs, while it includes PrEP, a prevention protocol which includes a $1,300 per month pill—and offers no protection against other STDs.”
AIDS Healthcare Foundation (www.aidshealth.org), the largest global AIDS organization, currently provides medical care and/or services to over 696,000 individuals in 38 countries worldwide in the US, Africa, Latin America/Caribbean, the Asia/Pacific Region and Eastern Europe.