On a brilliant blue California morning, an ambulance idles up San Francisco’s Castro Street. A small rainbow flag flutters from its antenna while its speakers blare:
Young man, there’s no need to feel down!
Two days before one of the largest Gay Pride parades in the US, nearly everything in sight has been decked with rainbow flags. And balloons. And bunting.
Men young and old have begun streaming into the city’s largest sexual health clinic, Magnet at Strut, while a free consultation service at the University of California at San Francisco about two miles east is being swamped with calls from healthcare providers around the Bay Area. Many are desperate to get their patients started on the same blue pill before the weekend’s festivities lead to a flurry of hook-ups.
It’s not the little blue pill you might be thinking of. It’s Truvada, the brand name of a daily HIV prevention pill known as pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP.
The two-drug combination was originally formulated as a virus-suppressing therapy for HIV-positive people, but clinical trials later suggested it was also effective at blocking the virus from taking hold in the first place. In 2012 the US Food and Drug Administration gave it additional approval as a preventive drug, further expanding its use in May 2018 to include at-risk adolescents.
After a slow start, Truvada is surging in popularity around the world among men who have sex with men. Although good numbers are lacking, San Francisco is widely believed to have the highest uptake in the world. There, the rate of new HIV infections roughly halved between 2012 and 2016, attributed largely to more testing, better use of treatment to make people with HIV uninfectious, and PrEP.
Reference:
Although not mentioned by name, Pierre-Cedric Crouch was a critical source for this article.
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