From FS Magazine, Matthew Hodson writes on the importance of getting PrEP to those who need it.
The end of year reviews of 2016 were pretty damning. Bowie, Prince and George Michael led a long list of musical heroes who left us. Brexit in the UK and Trump in the US upset the pollsters and divided both nations. Worldwide, there was a succession of murderous atrocities committed, not least a bloody attack on a gay nightclub in Miami. And Princess Leia died. And then her mum died too.
But just before Christmas there was one bit of good news. 56 Dean Street, the busiest sexual health clinic in Europe, announced that they had seen a 40% drop in new HIV diagnoses. Shortly afterwards other London clinics chimed in, reporting drops in new diagnoses among gay and bisexual men in 2016 of between 35% and 50%.
I found this hard to process. To hear the news I’d been hoping, fighting and campaigning for half of my adult life felt almost too good to be true.
The change couldn’t be explained away by a drop in testing, which remained roughly the same. Also, there was no significant change in the rate of other STIs, which suggested that there hadn’t been a sudden, dramatic increase in condom use or other changes in sexual behaviour.
Treatment as prevention (TasP) undoubtedly was a contributing factor. Over the last few years there has been progress in reducing the number of people living with undiagnosed infection. People with HIV now access treatment earlier and when we are undetectable on treatment we’re no longer a transmission risk. That change has been growing steadily over the last few years so it didn’t seem to explain the massive, game-changing drops that the clinics were reporting. This had to be the result of something new.