Uh Oh, A Man contracts HIV while on PrEP

Well PrEP may not be as safe as we thought.

There's a case of a man contracting HIV while using the drug. Scientists did say this was possible, it was never completely, completely safe. However, cases like this one will remain pretty rare.

Here is so more info

David Knox, MD, an HIV specialist at the Maple Leaf Medical Clinic and the lead author of the case study, presented findings at the 2016 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) in Boston. Evidence suggests that the individual in question, a 43-year-old man who has sex with men, adhered well to PrEP over the long-term. Nevertheless, after 24 months on Truvada he tested positive for HIV. Initial tests indicated that he was acutely (very recently) infected: He tested positive for the p24 antigen, which appears within about three weeks of HIV infection and disappears a few weeks afterward; and at that time he tested negative for HIV antibodies, which typically appear two to eight weeks after infection

Go here for more on this issue, and if you're on PrEP, please play safe reguardless

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Interesting Quote: Zachary Quinto

“It was not my intention to judge anybody or to rankle anybody, or to put myself in some kind of superior position by any means. I think if people use PrEP as part of a responsible regimen of taking care of themselves and preserving their bodies and their well-being and the well-being of the people they’re having sex with, then more power to them.
There was this thing that I was ‘slut-shaming.’ Anybody who knows me knows that that is the last thing I would ever do. I just think that we can’t let our guard down.”

His response to the criticism he got for his PrEP comment 

NY Magazine discusses Truvada and what it means for Gay Sex

There's a new article about Truvada and the "freedoms" it guarantees. Many gay men are hoping to use it to have, as one guy said, the sex he deserves.

Here are some key parts of the article that I noticed:

Several months after starting the drug, Gabriel says it’s allowed him to be bolder and more unapologetic in his desires, to have the kind of joyfully promiscuous, liberated sex that men enjoyed with one another in the decade or so after the Stonewall riots brought gay life out from the shadows and before the AIDS crisis shrouded it in new, darker ones.

For some men, Truvada’s new use seems just as revolutionary for sex as it is for medicine. “I’m not scared of sex for the first time in my life, ever. That’s been an adrenaline rush,” says Damon L. Jacobs, 43, a therapist who has chronicled his own experience with the drug on Facebook so enthusiastically that some assume Gilead, the drug’s manufacturer, must be paying him. (It’s not, say both he and Gilead.)

And...

It is not particularly hard for an employed, insured gay man in a big American city to hear about and obtain Truvada. That’s not the case for much of the group that potentially needs it the most: African-American gay and bisexual males between 13 and 24, who, in 2010, accounted for twice as many estimated new HIV infections as their white or Hispanic counterparts.

Christopher Street and its adjacent piers have long been a hangout for gay and trans kids of color. I spent a few days there this summer, asking people I met what they knew and thought about PrEP. In some ways, they weren’t very different from the older guys I talked to about it in Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen bars: One of them would know about Truvada, might even be on it, via a health agency like the Harlem Prevention Center, while the ­others had no idea. Many simply said that they didn’t believe me that such a pill existed, that I had bad information.

I'm not completely sold on this new pill and it seems expensive for a majority of folks who needs it. Please check out this article and let me know what you think. I may have to come back to this soon.