HIV and ID Observations

May 15th, 2014

CDC Recommends Broader Use of Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis — Can We Make It Happen?

Making a much stronger and more comprehensive statement than their earlier “Guidance,” the CDC is now recommending tenofovir/FTC (Truvada) for all Americans at high risk for HIV. More specifically, they recommend it for a broad range of people who have certain risk factors (click to see full size image): One certainly gets why this was done — as summarized nicely in […]

---

June 13th, 2013

PrEP Works in Injection Drug Users, CDC Offers “Guidance”

From The Lancet comes this important study of tenofovir pre-exposure prophylaxis for injection drug users (IDUs): In this randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial, we enrolled volunteers from 17 drug-treatment clinics in Bangkok, Thailand … We randomly assigned [2413] participants to either tenofovir or placebo … 50 became infected during follow-up: 17 in the tenofovir group and 33 […]

---

August 9th, 2012

New PrEP “Guidance” Released by CDC

The CDC issued its second “Interim Guidance” on the use of tenofovir/FTC as pre-exposure prophylaxis for prevention of HIV, this time for prevention of HIV in heterosexually active adults. The rationale? Since January 2011, data from studies of PrEP among heterosexual men and women have become available, and on July 16, 2012, the Food and Drug […]

---

June 8th, 2012

SPARTAN: Two-Drug, NRTI-Sparing Strategies Continue to Disappoint

Just published is the cleverly named “SPARTAN” study — spartan because it leaves out both NRTIs and ritonavir — and the results are very interesting. Ninety-three treatment-naive HIV-positive study subjects were randomized 2:1 to receive either a two-drug regimen of raltegravir 400 mg BID + atazanavir 300 mg BID, or a standard regimen of TDF/FTC + boosted atazanavir. […]

---

May 10th, 2012

Advisory Meeting Today on Tenofovir/FTC for PrEP, and a Proposed “Niche” for its Use

From Bloomberg News: Gilead Sciences Inc.’s pill Truvada was safe and effective when used to protect uninfected people from getting HIV, U.S. regulators said in a report indicating the main concerns are when and how it should be used … The FDA asked its advisers to suggest who should get Truvada; what testing would be needed […]

---

July 13th, 2011

More Favorable Results on PrEP, But …

As part of the usual flurry of studies released just before major scientific meetings, results of two pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) trials in heterosexual men and women have just been made public: In the CDC TDF2 study, 1200 HIV-uninfected men and women in Botswana were randomized to take oral tenofovir/FTC or placebo daily. Tenofovir/FTC was found to reduce the […]

---