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Treating everyone diagnosed would not end HIV in US gay men, Los Angeles-based model finds
Gus Cairns, 2013-04-11 14:30:00
Increasing HIV testing frequency, and giving everyone antiretroviral therapy (ART), would not in themselves reduce HIV prevalence in US gay men, a mathematical model suggests.
These measures would produce, in the model’s baseline scenario, a 34% reduction in the cumulative number of new infections and a 19% reduction in cumulative deaths by the year 2023. This would lead to the annual number of new HIV infections in gay men almost declining to the annual number of deaths, but not quite.
The model therefore predicts that HIV prevalence would continue to grow in US gay men, albeit very slowly. This remains the situation under a number of different scenarios; even if every gay man took an HIV test every year, and everyone diagnosed with HIV started treatment within six months of infection, infections would still slightly outstrip mortality.
The model also finds that universal treatment would lead to a doubling in the prevalence of multidrug-resistant HIV, although this would not lead to an increase in deaths or progression to AIDS.
However this particular output from the model derives from data on the prevalence of primary HIV drug resistance that is more than seven years old and 'MDR' means any resistance to two of the three main classes of HIV drug that were well-established at this point, not resistance to all options currently available.
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