Why we shouldn't over-hype the use of PrEP to prevent HIV transmission

Recently we got great news from a real-world study of HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP).

Researchers at San Francisco's Kaiser Permanente Medical Center reported on the real-world experience of 657 people who started PrEP between 2012 and 2015. Over 99% were men who have sex with men, 84% reported multiple sexual partners, and 30% had HIV-positive partners. Together they were observed for over 388 person-years of PrEP use.

The big news: Exactly zero patients contracted HIV infection! That's huge.

The problem is, the popular conversation about it has been over the top. From The Washington Post to FoxNews and the Huffington Post, people have been saying it's "100% effective" and lots of other undeserved superlatives.

PrEP works, this study was great, but there is real danger in all of this over-hype.

Read more in my new post over at TheBodyPro. 

New challenges of an aging epidemic

The AIDS activist Larry Kramer once said,

AIDS was allowed to happen. It is a plague that need not have happened. It is a plague that could have been contained from the very beginning.

The past 10 years we have witnessed innumerable incredible advances in HIV science and HIV treatment, but Mr. Kramer's words still ring true. We could have done more to stop it, and we still leave a lot of the work left undone.

This is particularly poignant since new challenges have now joined the old scourges of poverty and stigma and the wily habits of a historically pernicious virus. 

These new challenges include what one of my patients called the "Peter Pan Syndrome" and an uptick in injection drug use in many areas of the United States. The Peter Pan Syndrome is when patients told they did not have long to live at the beginning of the HIV epidemic now grapple with the accelerated effects of aging, a phase of life they never thought they would face. Additional challenges include complacency in youth who didn't grow up losing friends from HIV, and donor fatigue, and the short-term thinking of budget-conscious legislators who cut funding to HIV prevention programs that save lives.

These and other modern realities of the 2015 HIV epidemic are on full display in a new article in the Concord Monitor in which I was proud to be quoted, including:

The most pernicious myth in the HIV epidemic today is that people infected with HIV contracted the virus because they are somehow different – that in some way people with HIV deserved to get infected. This is hard-hearted and ill-informed, but I understand how the finger-pointing can be a defense mechanism against fear. The truth is, we are all vulnerable to this wily virus, and the only way we will win against HIV is to band together in compassion.

Twenty years from now will we look back and say we learned from our early mistakes, or will we rue the mistakes we made again and again?

Protecting patients from employee drug diversion

In May 2012, Exeter Hospital in Exeter, New Hampshire, announced it would temporarily close its cardiac catheterization lab after dozens of patients were diagnosed with acute hepatitis C infection.

In time, a multi-state investigation revealed that every case was linked back to a lab technician who was using patient drugs himself, and then putting contaminated vials back into use.

Further, there were multiple opportunities for the hospitals in which this technician worked to protect patients from him - but none were taken.

In a new article, ethicist Bill Nelson and I propose a nationwide reporting system that would help protect patients from the risks of drug diversion-related outbreaks like this one. 

The Paranoid Hypochondriac's Guide to Ebola

The Internet has lit up with news of a burgeoning Ebola virus outbreak in western Africa and the few cases that have trickled through to the United States.

This weekend, TV helicopters beat the air above the ambulance of a US doctor stricken with Ebola and transferred to Emory's high tech containment center for care. Viewers worldwide surely struggled to figure out how this was interesting, and why they were suddenly thinking about OJ Simpson.

Was this the beginning of the end? We'd all seen Gwenyth expire in Contagion so were we next?

Fortunately card-carrying epidemiologists have come to the rescue not with wonder drugs or martial law, but with the facts of the situation: this is a small epidemic largely confined to the developing world and unlikely to be a big deal in the US. It is, however, another reminder that the public health infrastructure in Africa has been neglected. They tried valiantly to placate, to reassure, and to divert the public's fickle attention back to the scarier infectious epidemics that afflict millions every year.

Amid the hubbub, I was proud to be quoted in Erin Gloria Ryan's new Jezebel piece, "The Paranoid Hypochondriac's Guide to the Ebola Outbreak." Should I be worried that the other folks quoted in the article chose to remain anonymous? Heck no! I'm going to go enjoy my ten seconds of fame, knowing full well the firestorm of corrections and trolling will begin soon. Ten. Nine. Eight...

If you were exposed, would you want to know?

This past week we  learned that 15 patients in New England were exposed to a rare infection called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) when neurosurgical instruments contaminated with the infection were used in their care. Each had undergone a brain or spinal surgery in early 2013, and now their future was uncertain.

Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease takes years to develop. Patients exposed to the infection feel fine for years but then they become moodier and forgetful and over the course of months subtle cognitive defects progress to severe dementia. Patients with CJD forget the names and faces of loved ones, they lose the ability to walk, speak, or swallow, and they lapse into a coma that has proven fatal one hundred percent of the time.

When Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease contamination of surgical instruments is discovered, doctors at Catholic Medical Center and other hospitals wonder if it is right to tell patients. In most cases the disease will never occur and there is no effective means of prevention. Even for the unlucky patients who do develop the disease – if any of them do – there is no effective therapy so advance warning gives no extra measure of hope. Worse still, there is no diagnostic test to predict who will escape infection or die, so the only thing patients can do once notified is wait. That means the only real world impact of disclosure, regardless of the eventual outcome, is patient distress. So in this case is knowledge power, or is knowledge just knowledge?

Continue reading my full article at TheAtlantic Health.  It was republished at medpageTODAY's KevinMD.com.