“PrEP is not a silver bullet.” If you speak to a lengthy roster of HIV advocates and researchers about the controversial HIV prevention pill Truvada, you will hear a good handful of them, unprompted, utter this phrase verbatim. Providing the drug to HIV-negative people isn’t meant as a panacea that will brush aside all other prevention methods, the experts stress. And only time will tell if pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, will actually help curb the U.S. HIV epidemic, in particular among gay men. Success on a public health scale depends on whether Truvada ends up in the medicine cabinets of a critical mass of people at high risk for HIV, and if they wind up adhering well to the daily regimen.
