Thursday, January 27, 2011

CDC Releases Interim Guidance for the Use of HIV Drugs as Prevention for Gay Men

Only high-risk gay and bisexual men should use Gilead's HIV drug Truvada to protect themselves from the AIDS virus, federal officials said on Thursday in the first official guidance on using the drug.

A study published last November showed that the pill, which combines two AIDS drugs, reduced the HIV infection rate by nearly 44 percent in high-risk gay and bisexual men. It worked even better if the men used the drug consistently.

Some doctors have already been using the experimental approach, called pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP for short. This use of the drug is not approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which has approved Truvada for treating HIV infection.

But the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention decided to issue some guidance for doctors who may want to prescribe the drug to protect people at very high risk of infection with the fatal and incurable virus.