Will PrEP give people the excuse to not use condoms?
There are many methods besides condoms that people are using to reduce their HIV risk. Some people serosort by partnering with people who have the same HIV status, reduce the number of people they have sex with, use female condoms, have sex with HIV-positive partner(s) with undetectable viral load(s), and/or use PrEP. Some methods are more effective than others depending on multiple factors.
What’s important to note is that there are a variety of options for people to protect themselves from HIV infection—also known as the prevention tool kit. Employing any or all of these methods is helpful in reducing risk and is, in fact, a way of taking responsibility for your sexual health.
Behavior change is very difficult, even when the stakes are high. Despite all that we know about the dangers of tobacco, millions continue to smoke. We also know that we should exercise and eat well, yet obesity is on the rise. We’ve got the same struggles when it comes to HIV prevention and sexual health.
Until now, adopting safer behaviors—including condom use—has been the only option available for people who wished to protect themselves from becoming infected. Lots of people were able to successfully change their behavior in the late 1980s and early 1990s, so much so that the rate of new infections dropped by an amazing degree.
Since then, however, helping people maintain safer behaviors or getting younger people to adopt them has gotten a lot harder. In fact, more than 50,000 people are estimated to have become infected each year since the mid- to late-1990s. That’s about 800,000 new infections since then. Among gay and bisexual men, new cases are actually on the rise, especially for young black and Latino men.
Why do we need new HIV Prevention tools, like PrEP?
Why would someone who doesn’t have HIV decide to take a pill every day?
Taking a pill every day to prevent something from happening to your body is not a new or foreign concept. Currently, there are over 10 million women in the United States who take a pill every day to prevent pregnancy. Think of PrEP as like the birth control pill, except instead of preventing pregnancy, it reduces risk for HIV.