There’s a Daily Pill to Protect Against HIV, Here’s How It Works

There’s an almost-perfect HIV prevention pill, but not enough people are using it

A once-a-day-pill to prevent HIV works well in the real world settings (Photo: iStock altered by The Quint)

From the last three years, there’s a pill in the market which can protect you from getting infected with HIV.

The drug is so effective that only 2 out of the 500 high-risk people taking part in the study got infected over the year long, study, the scientists reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association. And that was also when volunteers continued to have risky, unsafe sex.

About 2 million Indians are at a high-risk for HIV and could hugely benefit from this pill. Sold under the brand name, Truvada, critics have been dismissive of this medication, worrying that a fall-back option will promote unsafe sex and a rise in infections. Precisely why very few people are actually taking this drug, even most physicians aren’t aware that such a “pre-exposure prophylactic” treatment exists.

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Preventive medication is considered to be among the world’s most powerful weapons in ending the AIDS epidemic. Despite numerous advances in fighting the disease in recent decades, HIV remains one of the most devastating health issues across the world (Photo: iStock)

Truvada is a combination drug that was originally developed to treat the infection but studies found that giving it to the high-risk population could lower their risk of contracting HIV as much as 90%. But in 2012, this drug was tested only in labs, many experts questioned its efficacy in the real world clinics and community health centers.

But now, studies in more than 450 men who have sex with men have shown that taking this preventive pill reduces the risk of contracting HIV by a whopping 92%. Studies in injection drug users have found that this drug reduced the risk of infection by more than 70%. Only two men became HIV positive, and they both had blood tests that showed the drug levels dropped in the blood, almost certainly because they didn’t take the pills as directed.

Yet very few people are taking the drug in India - and it is not just awareness that is holding this treatment back. The drug is not readily available here, there are no Indian generics for it, a month’s course can cost up to Rs 6 lakhs!

Well, that’s a bomb but Charlie Sheen’s ex-girlfriend, Amanda Bruce, admitted she was on the medication to prevent becoming HIV positive.

Last week, Charlie Sheen gave an incredibly brave interview to Today’s Matt Lauer, revealing that he was diagnosed HIV positive four years ago (Photo Courtesy: Twitter/@CharlieFKNSheen)

Earlier Sheen said that medication reduced his HIV levels to an undetectable level.

Although he disclosed that he has not always used condoms, he said that his sexual partners knew about his diagnosis and were under the care of his doctor.

Sheen’s doctor, Dr Robert Huizenga explained that, with the advent of newer drugs, HIV gets suppressed to the point that it cannot be detected in the blood. So there is a very small chance that people on treatment can pass the virus to someone else. Also, the virus isn’t powerful enough to attack the patient’s immune system, so it becomes more of a chronic disease and people go on to live regular lives.

Till date, HIV has claimed more than 34 million lives around the world. Hopefully the price of this drug will be slashed so that millions of high-risk people don’t get the stigma of a ‘positive’ status.