PrEP propaganda reaching fever pitch
Also: Important note about Almost Cancelled
It seems that with more and more frequency I receive articles about the woeful uptake of PrEP and its disastrous underprescription. A year ago, this wasn’t happening.
Witness the article, Study: Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis Significantly Under-Prescribed to Prevent HIV in Eligible Patients, in which there is much hand-wringing regarding how to get PrEP to more patients. (Perhaps AI will be helpful.)
Primary care is under-utilizing pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) to reduce the spread of HIV, according to significant findings from a new study published in Sage. Only 0.9% of family medicine (FM) providers and 2.0% of general internal medicine (GIM) providers prescribed PrEP to eligible patients; however, the study authors do not fully know why prescribing rates continue to be low in the primary care setting.
I don’t really have a whole lot to say about this, except to note this extreme oddity. It was just about eleven months ago that I first reported on PrEP, understanding at the time that this was very far out of the mainstream consciousness. How is it suddenly everywhere? It’s very, very odd.
Note: The price of Almost Cancelled will be raised to $4.99 on Thursday October 12, so if you want your copy for only $0.99, hop on it!
It is interesting that PreP is said to be the thing that will save and protect people from dying from AIDS. Yet the uptake is so small that it can't be accounting for the lack of millions of people dying of AIDS. Aren't they inadvertently exposing the fact that whatever AIDS was back in the early 80s, it's no longer a thing? In a free market system, demand produces a product for that demand. I live in Utah, as an example in the year 2019 there was a grand total of 140 new 'infections' diagnosed. I think this is exactly why there's a push to expand the markets for prep.
On the other hand, think about what would happen if there was substantially greater uptake. If just 1 to 2% of physicians were prescribing to 'eligible' people, and there's a lawsuit of 24k people seeking damages from side effects, just imagine what that would be if the uptake for Truvada/Descovy had been just an order of magnitude higher.
Is the patent for truvada about to expire? Or whatever current prep the pharmaceutical funders of this “research” sell?