AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) welcomed the news last week of an 18% decline in HIV infections in the United States between 2008 and 2014, but is questioning some of the conclusions drawn by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) officials regarding the role of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), 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.
In a CDC press release issued last week timed to coincide with the annual Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) held in Seattle, (“New HIV infections drop 18 percent in six years” February 14, 2017), CDC officials rightly tagged treatment-as-prevention as a likely contributor to the welcome decline in infections, 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.”
However, AHF officials believe that the CDC was 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.”