From the LA Times:

The Food and Drug Administration said Tuesday that Gilead Sciences’ Truvada appears to be safe and effective for HIV prevention. It concluded that taking the pill daily could spare users “infection with a serious and life-threatening illness that requires lifelong treatment.”

On Thursday, a panel of FDA advisors will vote on whether Truvada should be approved as a preventive treatment for people who are at high risk of contracting the human immunodeficiency virus through sexual intercourse. The FDA is not required to follow the advice of its panels, but usually does.

An estimated 1.2 million Americans have HIV, which attacks the immune system and, unless treated with antiviral drugs, develops into AIDS, a fatal condition in which the body cannot fight off infections. If Truvada is approved, it would be a major breakthrough in the 30-year campaign against the AIDS epidemic. No other drugs have been proven to prevent HIV and a vaccine is believed to be decades away.

Gilead Sciences Inc., based in Foster City, Calif., has marketed Truvada since 2004 as a treatment for people who are infected with the virus. The medication is a combination of two older HIV drugs, Emtriva and Viread. Doctors usually prescribe the medications as part of a drug cocktail that makes it harder for the virus to reproduce. Patients with low viral levels have reduced symptoms and are far less likely to develop AIDS.

Researchers first reported in 2010 that Truvada could prevent people from contracting HIV. A three-year study found that daily doses cut the risk of infection in healthy gay and bisexual men by 44%, when accompanied by condoms and counseling. Another study found that Truvada reduced infection by 75% in heterosexual couples in which one partner was infected with HIV and the other was not.

Read the full article on the LA Times Website.

From WebMD…

An online game aimed at gay men has been launched to promote the importance of regular checkups for sexual health.

The game, ‘Man Up‘, has been devised by the HIV and sexual health charity Terrence Higgins Trust. It carries the message that the more men you have sex with, the more often you should be screened for sexually transmitted infections (STIs).

The game, which is available on Facebook, sees players attempt to bounce between brightly coloured beds without either falling off the screen, or being knocked off by a ‘love bug’. The higher they manage to bounce, the more points they receive.  However, points can only be banked through a visit to the floating clinic.

Players also receive messages containing important facts on sexual health, including how STIs are transmitted and guidance on how often to test for them. There is also a link to a website with further sexual health information, and a clinic finder which lists the nearest screening service to the player.

Read the full story on WebMD. Play the game on Facebook.

From the Los Angeles Times:

California will test an HIV-prevention pill in an attempt to slow the spread of the disease in the state, researchers announced Tuesday.

The pill, which is already used to treat HIV patients, will be prescribed to 700 gay and bisexual men and transgender women in Los Angeles, San Diego and Long Beach who are high-risk but not infected.

“With this new prevention pill, we have another intervention to put in the arsenal to try and impact this epidemic,” said George Lemp, director of the California HIV/AIDS Research Program with the UC president’s office.

The program awarded $11.8 million in state grants for the prevention pill studies and efforts to get about 3,000 HIV-infected people in Southern California into treatment and keep them there. The grants will go to a group of UC schools, local governments and AIDS organizations.

There are an estimated 140,000 people living with HIV or AIDS in California, including about 30,000 who don’t know they are infected, Lemp said.

The pill, under the brand name of Truvada, is already approved by the Food and Drug Administration for treating HIV but not for prophylactic use. In 2010, a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine said that it reduced the risk of contracting HIV by 44% to 73%, depending on how often participants took their medication.

Read the full article on the LA Times website.

From the Huffington Post…

By Amber Hall, Executive Producer for SiriusXM OutQ.

There are many reasons that AIDS isn’t on the front pages or in the forefront of our minds every day. As a community, we’re well aware of the medical advances and treatment options. We can calculate our risk factors. We know how to prevent transmission, and the importance of safe sex, or at least we think we do.

Bottom line: we don’t see our friends and lovers dying on a daily basis, and that means the immediacy of action and protection for many is less important while the stigma surrounding HIV/AIDS remains high, a dangerous combination. Moreover, there is an entirely new generation of gay and bi men who never experienced that immediacy and for whom HIV was never a big deal.

Perhaps that’s why in a 2011 national public opinion survey conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation, 8 in 10 Americans say they heard little or nothing about HIV/AIDS in the last year, and public concern about HIV/AIDS has fallen steadily over the years, including among those most heavily affected. And according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), nearly 1 in 5 gay and bisexual men (19 percent) in 21 major U.S. cities today are HIV-positive — and nearly half of those who are infected (44 percent) don’t know it. It’s clear that attention needs to be paid, and I’m proud to say that Sirius XM OutQ is strengthening its commitment to covering issues surrounding HIV/AIDS.

On Saturday, March 17, from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. EDT, Sirius XM OutQ will air the first installment of SpeakOUT: Real Talk About AIDS in Gay America. The show will be co-hosted by Larry Flick, host of OutQ’s The Morning Jolt, and Dr. Frank Spinelli, M.D., author of The Advocate Guide to Gay Men’s Health and Wellness. The first show will focus on the politics of mating — relationships and HIV — tackling such issues as how to ask a partner to get tested and use condoms, and how to disclose your status to a new partner. It will also explore the effects of Grindr and other popular social networking sites on HIV/AIDS among gay and bi men.

To read the full story, go to Huffington Post Gay Voices.

From Fenway Health in Boston…

Press Release: Analysis examines biomedical prevention technology to be reviewed by U.S. Food and Drug Administration by June 15, 2012

Pre-exposure chemoprophylaxis (PrEP) —taking antiretroviral medications to prevent HIV transmission—could be a “game changer” for HIV prevention, according to an analysis released by The Fenway Institute.

PrEP has demonstrated partial efficacy with men who have sex with men (MSM) and heterosexuals in several recent studies. Recent modeling of PrEP implementation coupled with scaled up treatment predicts that PrEP could significantly reduce HIV incidence and prevalence. If PrEP is accompanied by sustained care, behavioral interventions, and safety monitoring, PrEP need not lead to increased sexual risk behavior or drug resistance.

“PrEP has the potential to dramatically reduce HIV incidence among gay men, heterosexual women and men, and other populations,” said Sean Cahill, Director of Health Policy Research at The Fenway Institute and author of the report. “We look forward to action by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the World Health Organization this year to make PrEP available to those most vulnerable to HIV. PrEP could prove an invaluable new tool in the fight against HIV.”

To read the full press release go to Fenway Health online.

From TheScientist.com:

A pain-free, non-invasive saliva test is as accurate as a traditional blood test to diagnose infections of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), according to a new meta-analysis published yesterday (January 24) in The Lancet Infectious Diseases. The test could be a solution for countries that wish to adopt self-testing strategies for HIV.

Pooling data from five worldwide databases, an international team of researchers found that Oraquick HIV-1/2, a saliva test sold by Pennsylvania-based OraSure Technologies, is 99 percent accurate for HIV in high-risk populations and about 97 percent accurate in low-risk populations. The test requires a single swab of the gums, which is then inserted into a handheld device that produces results in 20 minutes. The Oraquick has been available to clinicians since 2004 and is being considered for use as an over-the-counter test in the United States and sub-Saharan countries

You can read the full article at TheScientist.com.

From the Huffington Post:

Testing Together, now under way in Chicago and Atlanta, takes an unusual approach: It encourages gay male couples to get tested together and hear their results together. After delivering the results, a counselor talks with the couple about what to do next, including agreements they may want to make with each other about sex and health.

Are we agreeing to be monogamous? Is any sexual activity outside the relationship OK? How are we going to protect each other from infection? Couples address these questions and more.

The idea is to bring honesty to sexual relationships, said one of the researchers behind the program, Rob Stephenson of the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University in Atlanta.

Relationships offer only “mythical protection” from HIV, Stephenson said. Some couples may have avoided talking about each other’s HIV status, thinking, “If he were HIV positive he would have told me,” or “If he wanted to know, he would have asked.”

Read the full article on the Huffington Post Gay Voices section.