Another way to look at this article: the latest (and arguably most promising) HIV prevention techniques involve treatment-as-prevention[0]; in other words, taki

Another way to look at this article: the latest (and arguably most promising) HIV prevention techniques involve treatment-as-prevention[0]; in other words, taking HIV antiretrovirals as prophylactics. Ten or fifteen years ago, this wouldn't have been possible[1], because the treatments were unpleasant enough that nobody would want to take them daily if they didn't have to. This is an incredible paradigm shift for HIV prevention, because it completely overturns the way we've been conceptualizing it. We've always thought of HIV like polio, which we are eradicating with a vaccine. Instead, the end of HIV/AIDS may very well come in the form of the same medications we've already developed. More importantly, we already have a great distribution mechanism for HIV medications in (e.g.) sub-Sarharan Africa, which means that we don't need to re-train people and create new programs; we would just need to expand the ones we already have. None of this would have been possible with the drugs we had in the 90s, even if we had wanted to get FDA approval for PrEP (which of course, would have been political suicide). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenofovir/emtricitabine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenofovir/emtricitabine [1] Technically the drug that's used for this today came out 14 years ago, but it wasn't as commonly-used, and most of the drugs back then still sucked.