March 14, 2018 BY imani leave a comment
The number of people taking PrEP in the United States is steadily increasing, exceeding 77,000 in 2016, according to figures released yesterday by AIDSVu in conjunction with the 25th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections.
But PrEP is only reaching a small proportion of those who could benefit from it. Among the estimated 1.1 million people nationwide who are potential candidates for PrEP, only 8% are receiving it, according to new data from the CDC. Although African Americans and Latinos make up about two-thirds of people who stand to benefit from PrEP, they are much less likely than white people to be using it.
The US Food and Drug Administration approved Truvada for HIV prevention in July 2012. It has been difficult to estimate the total number of people using PrEP because this information is not centrally collected. At the International AIDS Society Conference on HIV Science last summer, Gilead researchers reported that an estimated 120,000 people had ever started Truvada for PrEP since 2012.
Now, Gilead has teamed up with researchers at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health to make the latest PrEP numbers available via AIDSVu, an interactive online map of the US HIV/AIDS epidemic. The new figures presented in AIDSVu show the number of individuals who were prescribed Truvada for HIV prevention during 2016. The data released this week indicate that a total of 77,120 people were using PrEP in 2016, up from 8768 in 2012. This represents a 73% average annual increase, or a cumulative increase of 877% over the entire four-year period.
Men accounted for 93% of PrEP users in 2016. Although women account for about 19% of all new HIV diagnoses in the US, they make up only 7% of PrEP users. About two-thirds of PrEP users are in the 25-to-44 age range, a group that accounted for just over half of new diagnoses. While 21% of new diagnoses are in people under the age of 25, only 11% of PrEP users are in this age group.
In terms of geography, the rate of PrEP use in the Northeast region was around twice that of the West, South or Midwest (47.4, 28.1, 22.6 and 23.5 users per 100,000 people, respectively). Although just over half of all new HIV diagnoses occurred in the south, this region was home to only 30% of PrEP users. The Northeast, which had the highest rate of PrEP use at 38.5 and 13.3 new HIV diagnoses per 100,000, had the highest PrEP-to-need ratio, at 2.9. The South had a low PrEP use rate of 18.8 and a high diagnosis rate of 20.9 per 100,000, giving the lowest PrEP-to-need ratio, at 0.9. The Midwest and West fell in between, with PrEP-to-need ratios of 2.1 and 1.8, respectively.
“We hope that the newly available data on AIDSVu will allow health departments, elected officials, medical professionals and community leaders to better understand and visualize the realities of who has access to this important prevention tool so they can develop programs and policies to decrease barriers,” commented AIDSVu principal scientist Patrick Sullivan.