Ibadan – A new research presented at the HIV Drug Therapy Conference in Glasgow has revealed that Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) could be given to millions of people worldwide to prevent new HIV infections.

The research also indicated that the drug had no increased risk of safety issues during treatment.

This is contained in a statement signed by Mandy Sugrue, Communications Director, International AIDS Society (IAS), and made available to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Ibadan on Tuesday.

NAN reports that PrEP is a combination of two drugs that people could take before sex to prevent HIV infection.

The statement said that existing evidence showed that people who take Tenofovir Disoproxil Fumarate (TDF) and Emtricitabine (FTC) as PrEP have a 90 per cent lower chance of being infected with HIV than people that do not take it.

It said that widespread use of TDF and FTC could be justified only if its preventative benefits outweighed potential risks of safety issues, explaining that new results presented at the conference revealed that PrEP was safe to use.

The statement said that researchers undertook a meta-analysis of 13 randomized trials with 15,678 participants to reach the conclusions.

It said that people at risk of HIV infection were given either TDF and FTC as PrEP or no treatment (the control, or placebo).

“There was no significant difference in risk of high grade or serious adverse events comparing PrEP with control. The risk of serious adverse events was almost the same for both groups: 9.4 per cent for those on PrEP and 10.1 per cent for those on placebo.

“There was also no significant difference in risk of renal or bone adverse outcomes. The risk of bone fractures was 3.7 per cent on PrEP versus 3.3 per cent on no treatment.

“The risk of significant renal dysfunction was 0.1 per cent on PrEP and 0.1 per cent for no treatment,” the statement read in part.

Anton Pozniak, IAS President, said that in 2016, there were 1.8 million new HIV infections worldwide and the same number again in 2017.

“Across a range of studies, men who have sex with men have one in 30 chance of contracting HIV in a year.

“Others, particularly vulnerable populations’, such as people who inject drugs or sex workers, have a one in 50 chance of being infected with HIV.

“Worldwide, there are only 300,000 people estimated to be taking PrEP. This is far too small a number to prevent 1.8 million new HIV infections,” he said.

Pozniak said that to achieve significant effect on the HIV epidemic, there was needed to scale up PrEP to reach tens of millions of people worldwide.

He said that other PrEP modalities, such as long-acting injectable drugs and antibodies were being tested in order to offer more choices of how PrEP could be taken.

According to him, “WHO updated its official guidelines in 2015 to include the use of PrEP as a prevention method. The data is clear and it is time to globally implement this recommendation”.

Dr Andrew Hill from Liverpool University said there were new HIV infections every 18 seconds globally.

“Every person newly infected will then need to be treated for life, and could transmit HIV to others. We need radical changes in our prevention strategy to cut new HIV infections down to zero,” he said.

Hill said that the most widely used PrEP, a combination of TDF and FTC costs only £40 per year to make, saying a generic TDF/FTC course is available in the UK for £300 per year and £50 in sub-Saharan Africa.

“With recent legal rulings, low-cost, generic PrEP is becoming more available. This provides an opportunity, with the decreasing costs making it increasingly feasible to provide PrEP to millions of people at risk of HIV worldwide,” Hill said.

The statement said that another recent analysis, showed no difference in adverse events between TDF/FTC and a combination of Tenofovir Alafenamide (TAF) and FTC when taken for treatment with an additional antiviral drug.