Pharmaceutical industry front group AVAC is blowing the usual trumpet for PrEP because some recent trial results have been encouraging. They said predictably little about results which were not so encouraging.
The problem with PrEP still remains: no high prevalence country has managed to put all HIV positive people on antiretrovirals, not even all those who are at the stage of disease progression where it is a serious threat to their health. Why does anyone think they can roll out a drug for people who are not infected with HIV on the grounds that it might give them 'up to' 73% protection?
If 20% of sexually active people are infected with HIV and most of the other 80% are considered to be at risk of infection, will they all be given PrEP? Think of the cost, the logistics, the high levels of resistance, the side effects, things instititutions like AVAC and UNAIDS don't seem to be willing to discuss sensibly.
It also seems like a humiliating climbdown for UNAIDS and all the others who maintained that HIV is almost always spread through unsafe heterosexual sex in African countries (though hardly ever in non-African countries, however unintuitive that may sound). Are all 'risk reduction' strategies now to cease?
Will we instead just give out drugs and ignore the things we appeared to deplore for the last thirty years, promiscuous men, survival sex, commercial sex work, exploitation, early and unplanned pregnancies, early marriage, concurrent relationships, large numbers of partners, low use of condoms, lack of family planning and whatever other issues we have spent so long bemoaning?
Warren Mitchell from AVAC remembered to thank the trial volunteers, presumably mostly guinea pigs who, if they are African, will never be able to afford the drugs and for whom the money to pay for them may never be raised. I don't suppose he was being ironic, either.
Another move which looks suspiciously like a way to vastly increase the volume of ARV drug sales, and thereby increase dependency on drugs and funding, is a strategy called test and treat (or various other names). This involves testing the whole population of a country regularly, perhaps every year, and putting everyone found positive on treatment.
Testing even a reasonable percentage of people in a population once has remained elusive, let alone the whole population or the whole population every year. But even testing once a year is not thought to be enough, so test and treat is still just a theory. And it is well known that early treatment carries a lot of risks that have not yet been adequately explored.
It is to be wondered if people will be obliged to take the drugs by law or if they will face stigma if they refuse. UNAIDS has many years of experience in the use of stigma as a weapon with which to threaten people and punish them for being African so perhaps they have some plans in this area. No disease has ever been beaten by drugs alone so it seems hard to believe that HIV will be the first. But it is great news for the pharmaceutical industry.
[For more about PrEP and HIV issues in Africa, see my other blog, HIV in Kenya.]
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