Can we end the North American HIV epidemic? We have the pills, the prevention plan and the strategy to prevent infections — so what’s stopping us?
Daily Extra points out that as a strategy to end the epidemic, [U=U] would be 10 times greater than PrEP alone, yet we hear much less about this — and that’s a problem in itself. “The Prevention Access Campaign (PAC), a multi-agency health equity initiative to end HIV and HIV-related stigma, has been working overtime to push this information.
‘There are people from public health departments that, although they agree with the science of [U=U] they’re concerned about two things,” Bruce Richman, the executive director of PAC, tells me. “One is about a decrease in condom use among people with HIV, and the resulting increase in STIs. And two, the sophisticated consumer issue, which means that the person with HIV, might not understand that in order to stay undetectable, they have to adhere to treatment. Those are issues that can be addressed by education.’”
