One of the most important HIV conferences of the year, the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI 2020) took place in the second week of March, just as many people’s attention was engulfed by the new coronavirus.
You might have missed some of the key developments in HIV prevention presented at the meeting:
The extra price the US health system may pay for the new, branded version of PrEP (Descovy) rather than the older version (Truvada or its cheaper generic equivalents) is not remotely justifiable in terms of its marginally more benign side effect profile, according to a cost-effectiveness analysis.
Community-level viral suppression was strongly associated with a large drop in the number of new HIV infections among gay and bisexual men in Australia between 2012 and 2017. The study shows the impact of ‘treatment as prevention’ even before PrEP became available in Australia.
However, an analysis of four massive randomised studies of ‘test and treat’ strategies in sub-Saharan Africa showed that their impact on new HIV infections was more modest. “90-90-90 does not result in HIV elimination and universal test and treat will not control generalised HIV epidemics on their own,” said Dr Kevin de Cock.