Saturday, July 12, 2014

HIV infections are exploding among gay men, according to the World Health Organization

In fact, the infection rates are so bad that the organization — for the first time — strongly recommends that men who have sex with men consider taking antiretroviral medicines as an additional method of preventing HIV infection. Despite the attention drawn to HIV infections among gay men in the 1980s, WHO's HIV head says that the younger generation is less focused on the disease when, in fact, gay men are 19 times more likely to contract HIV than the general population. WHO notes that taking pre-exposure prophylaxis or PrEP — typically, two antiretrovirals combined into one daily pill — in addition to the use of condoms is estimated to cut HIV incidence among gay men by up to 25% or prevent "up to one million new infections among this group over 10 years."

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