A Kaiser Permanente study on the use of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) by gay men and men who have sex with multiple men to prevent possible HIV transmission has reported an “eye-popping statistic”—a 45% increase in condom-less sex among certain study participants. Earlier this year, the CDC recommended that 500,000 men-who-have-sex-with-men and other high-risk individuals go on PrEP, despite the fact that data from nearly all major PrEP studies do not support such large-scale public deployment of PrEP due to medication adherence issues: Even in carefully monitored clinical trials demonstrating the drug’s clinical efficacy, many study participants simply did not take the medication every day as prescribed. In addition, PrEP (known under its commercial name as Truvada) does nothing to prevent other STDS, in particular the reemerging gay epidemic of syphilis: “In 2012, men who have sex with men (MSM) accounted for 75% of primary and secondary syphilis cases in the United States.”
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