Name: Sameeha
Current Event Posting #4
Topic: Health
Title of Article: Panel recommends approving Truvada to prevent HIV infection
Author: Saundra Young
Publication Name: CNN
Date of Publication: May 10, 2012
Length of Article: 789 Words

Recently, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration advisory committee has recommended that the drug Truvada be approved for prevention of the deadly virus, HIV. This drug has already been approved for treatment of AIDS, but it just now being considered as a pre-exposure pill (also called PrEP). Truvada is a pill manufactured by Gilead Sciences, Inc. and it is meant to be taken once a day in conjunction with other HIV drugs. Many health care professionals, AIDS advocates, and patients are worried that if the use of PrEP becomes widespread, condom use and other, more traditional, means of preventing HIV infection will decrease. Researchers do not know enough about the effects of these pills as a pre-exposure medicine yet to confidently say that it is “safe and effective for preventing HIV infections.”  One AIDS activist, Miki Jackson said, “to knowingly recommend a drug as powerful as Truvada with such serious side effects and give it to people who are perfectly healthy is frightening;” she is just one of many activists against the widespread use of Truvada as a prevention drug. However, the safety and efficacy data of the FDA’s clinical trials yielded positive results. In a study of homosexual men, researchers found 43.8% fewer infections in men who got the drug versus men who got the placebo. In another study, conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Botswana, infection rates were reduced by 63% overall in healthy men and women who were at high risk of getting the infection. The best results were seen in a study of sero-discordant couples (one partner is HIV positive and the other is HIV negative) in Kenya. Researchers found a 62% reduction of infection in couples taking Truvada and a 73% reduction in those who took a combination of Truvada and another HIV drug, tenofovir.

Although many activists condemn the use of this drug as a prevention drug, the FDA seems to have significant evidence proving that the drug is effective. However, the drug does have some dangerous side effects like nausea, vomiting, dizziness, loss of appetite, diarrhea, liver and kidney toxicity, and loss of bone density. Despite all the opposition Truvada faces, it does have some supporters like Chris Collins, vice president and director of public policy for the American Foundation for AIDS research. He does not believe in limiting access to this drug and he thinks that with proper treatment and education, Truvada can have a large role in bringing HIV-infection rates down. Founder and CEO of Abounding Prosperity Inc., Kirk Myers, who is HIV positive himself, believes that without this drug, “desperation will continue to drive up statistics of new incidents.” The FDA has to take all the research into account, but they will soon make a decision about whether or not to approve this drug.