Note: This post appeared over at Elizabeth Pisani’s new blog, “Portrait Indonesia”. “Wisdom of Whores” is still on hiatus as she travels Indonesia in preparation for her new book, but we thought that WOW readers might appreciate this particular post. If you’ve not done so already, please do go over to Portrait Indonesia and have a look around. You can get the RSS / Atom feed here.

AIDS prevention poster in Southeastern Maluku, 2011

I have a collection of daft AIDS posters going back years, but I’m glad to say they are getting harder to find. This one, in Saumlaki, the main town in the remote Tanimbar islands, was thus a great find. The headline reads: AIDS: there’s not yet any cure! On the right is this helpful information:

AIDS!!!
You can’t avoid it by:

• Choosing your sex partners on the basis of their appearance
• Drinking/injecting antibiotics, alcohol, or herbal medicine before and after having sex
• Washing your sex organs after having sex

Some, including the South African president Thabo Mbeki and uber-philanthropist Bill Gates would take issue with the last point. I, of course, would take partial issue with the second — you can avoid AIDS by taking medicine, you just can’t avoid HIV that way. But the most egregious part of this ad is the illustration.The population of Tanimbar is largely Melanesian. Overwhelmingly the highest HIV risk for them is the sex they might have on their frequent money-spinning travels to neighbouring Papua. Indonesian Papau, rich in minerals, forests and much else, is swimming in cash. It is also swimming in HIV; it’s epidemic looks more like East Africa 15 years ago than it does like any other part of Indonesia today. And it is populated not by pointy-nosed tourists with straight blonde hair but with flat-nosed Papuans with crinkly black hair.

Most AIDS posters are pretty useless, in my opinion. But this poster associates HIV with Western tourists slow-dancing under the palm trees — an “other” that most people here will never come across, while saying nothing about commercial sex in high risk areas (Papua, but also with the local transgender (or waria) population). Those are very real risks that many certainly do face, at least if Astuti, one of the latter, is to be believed. She excused herself early from a grilled fish dinner because her phone rang. Not her Blackberry, that’s for friends and family, but her “HP selinkungan” (cheating phone). In Tanimbar from neighbouring Kei for around a year, she hasn’t had a day without clients. And though she has helped distribute condoms and promote testing in other cities around Indonesia (in some of which one transgender sex worker in three is infected with HIV), she’s seen no sign of an HIV prevention programme in Tanimbar. By maintaining the fiction that something is being done about HIV prevention in Tanimbar, this poster is a lot worse than useless. It is actively dangerous.

Much has been going on in the world of HIV, sex and drugs in the last month or so; the US marines recruiting at gay community centers, more mysteriously disappointing study outcomes for PrEP, encouraging news about the effect of microbicide gels against herpes, a new super-easy condom with a brand name that will put off anyone who cares about staying power.

I’ve ignored it all. That’s in part because I’ve discovered a site that really says everything that needs to be said about HIV prevention. Particularly insightful, in this post entitled “usefulness connected realizing hiv indicators”, is this gem:

“For that faculty your body gets very suasible to numerous germ infections and so the indicators are sure not e’er the HIV symptoms. The true unique method to aver that a soul is with HIV is the HIV checking.”

I don’t think I can add to that. Which is my polite way of saying that I’m taking a sabbatical from HIV and epidemiology. I plan to spend the next year or so travelling around Indonesia, eventually writing a book about this wonderful and mad land. Which has it’s own fair share of Bad English, as you can see over at my new blog, Portrait Indonesia.

I’ll be spending a lot of time out of range of wi-fi etc., but will try and post at least weekly. If you’d like to follow my progress, you can sign up here.

For now, on the subject of sex and drugs, it’s over and out. Thanks for taking an interest over the last four years.

It’s not that often that I sit reading the FT on a Tube full of morning communters. Even less often that the Pink Paper (no, boys, not THAT Pink Paper) carries full page ads from the Purveyors of Porn. The ad is pimping a new internet domain ending: .xxx (Slogan: Coming, now!)

The porn industry is positioning itself anew (they don’t excuse the pun, so I wont either) as responsible citizens, protectors of children and the integrity of your credit card details. Re-registering your porn domain with a .xxx extension will make it easier to filter, keeping it away from kids and the easily-offended. Since all .xxx domains will be screened daily by Mcafee, they will be virus-free. The xxx admin folks will also enforce standards of financial transaction probity, apparently. In the meantime, they stand to make an awful lot of money themselves. But here’s my question: what does it say that the ad was placed, as a FULL PAGE, in the world’s most prominent financial organ? Perhaps that purveyors of porn have more to invest than the rest of us?

Certainly, the porn industry could do with brushing up its image after the recent kerfuffle over HIV transmission on porn film sets. Though plenty of people are demanding the introduction or enforcement of condom-only porn shoot rules, I suspect they are on a hiding to nowhere. Isn’t the whole point of porn that is is a bit transgressive? If condoms were sexy, we probably wouldn’t have reached over 60 million HIV infections to date. Goody-two shoes safe sex is rarely enough the stuff of our reality; it is almost never the stuff of our fantasies.

The Salon piece acknowledges this. It fails to stress another important point. Most of the on-set transmission of HIV occurs right after the infected person themselves became infected. This is a time when there is tonnes of virus floating around the body and it is very easily transmitted. It is also a time when antibodies have not yet developed. Since the standard HIV tests are for antibodies rather than the virus itself, they will miss these very new, very dangerous infections. Indeed it was a classic case report from the porn industry that confirmed in life what we suspected from lab work about the dangers of early viral load.

Possible solutions: set a minimum time between shoots of six weeks. That way, if someone gets infected on one shoot, they’ll test positive before the next one. Another solution would be to invest some of the massive profits of the porn industry in testing actors for the HIV virus itself, rather than for antibodies. Both of these solutions seem unlikely, given the profit imperative of porn, but in my mind they are both less improbable than condom-only porn.

One thing that interested me about the .xxx ad was that they are offering, for a small, one-time fee, to BLOCK names from being used with an .xxx extension. Do you think I should sign The Wisdom of Whores up to prevent our good name from being abused?

Apologies if this post looks odd. My first attempt to post from an iPad.

Taking anti-HIV pills every day cuts the risk of infection by 63%, said CDC researchers in Botswana. It cuts infection by up to 73%, said University of Washington researchers working in Kenya and Uganda. That’s great news, of course.

Here’s why I’m confused. The larger of these trials was conducted in 4,758 “discordant couples”. [I earlier incorrectly reported that both trials were in discordant couples. The CDC trial in fact recruited 1,200 sexually active uninfected heterosexuals, regardless of their partner status. Full inclusion and exclusion criteria here]. That means researchers in the large discordant couple trial knew that one person was infected and the other uninfected. They chose to give drugs to the uninfected person, to see if it would stop them becoming infected. And it does, in over 60% of cases. But another recent study shows that if we give the drugs to the infected partner, the one who might actually need these same drugs because they have HIV and need it surpressed, it cuts infection by 96%. So in the case of discordant couples, it seems to make much more sense to give the antiretrovirals in question to the infected partner.

That leaves us with the question: who should get PReP? Right now, there are not enough antiretrovirals to go around to treat all the sick people who need treatment. If we’re going to use them selectively for prevention, we should start with the most effective use, which appears to be early treatment of the infected partner in discordant couples. We could also give them to people who aren’t in a couple but who know that they’re likely to get around a bit and might want to stay safe without using condoms. That’s potentially a lot of people; it will stretch our purses. But more than that, it will stretch our political will. Let’s face it, HIV has reached eye-watering levels in many sub-Saharan African countries because both voters and governments have been in deep denial about their own, and their neighbours’, propensity to have sex with someone who is not their single life-time partner. Some people, including influential religious and community leaders, even continue to believe that giving out condoms encourages licentious sex. To them, giving out ARVs will surely mean encouraging licentious unprotected sex (if you’re anti-condom, is that better or worse?).

So who is PReP for? We’ve got a better option for discordant couples. We’re not going to want to give it to randy adolescents. We know it works for gay men, but some of the countries where the trials took place would rather thump or jail gay men than protect their sexual health. We’ve no idea yet if it works for drug users (though a deeply unethical trial by CDC in Thailand will tell us that soon.

Of course PReP will find its niche; when people actually take it it works really well (though not as well as abstinence, when people actually abstain, or condoms, when people actually use condoms). We’ll find out a bit more about just how well at the annual AIDS circus in Rome next week. I’ll look forward to learning what the actual incidence rates in the studies were, and more about sex differentials and adherence. But I think we would be unwise to rush around talking about massive roll-out of PReP before we actually figure out who it works for in the real world.

As an aside, the results have a huge potential impact for Gilead, manufacturer of both Viread (bascially tenofovir, one of the pills that worked in the trial) and Truvada (the tenofovir – emtricitabine combination that was the other). Gilead has come over all generous and has started letting Indian and other developing country companies copy their products. They’ll take a 5% fee; if we really do go for a massive roll-out of PrEP, that will keep drug costs down globally, while giving Gilead extra cash for very little effort. A win-win situation for which they should be congratulated.

A second aside: The CDC trial is confusing in a different way. In December 2009, CDC announced it was terminating the trial of Tenofovir for HIV prevention because they’d had so many drop-outs that the trial would be unlikely to show results even if they doubled the size of it. They kept it going not as an efficacy trial (testing Tenofovir against a placebo) but as a safety and behavioural trial (clocking how good people were at taking their pills, looking for side effects etc.). So it was quite surprising to find them leaping forward with efficacy reults, of which more details here.

Thanks to Eva for pointing out my error.

Thirty years ago next month, the first reports of the illness that came to be known as AIDS were published. Five cases, all among young gay guys in Los Angeles. Since then, we’ve racked up over 60 million HIV prevention failures worldwide. But new draft guidelines on safe sex advice proposed for the UK suggest we’ve learned almost nothing from three decades of failure.

The guidelines, proposed by the British Association for Sexual Health and HIV are depressing, at very best. They seem to assume that it is the duty of health professionals to protect people from their own bad behaviour, in part by informing them of every possible risk, however marginal. They seem also to assume that the sort of people who take significant risks on a regular basis care about their long term health prospects. We don’t. And that comes from someone who today happens to be wearing a T-shirt embazoned with a slogan picked by algorithm on the basis of answers to 10 behavioural questions. Mine reads: “Runs with scissors”, but it might equally have read “Cycles without a helmet”, “Shags without a condom” or “Rolls her own cigarettes”.

The guidelines available here in pdf form, are open for public comment for another week or so. I would strongly urge people (especially people who’ve ever used a sexual health clinic) to look through them and put in their tuppence worth. The full text of my own comments is available in a doc file here.

In summary, I’m upset that we are still telling people to use condoms every time they have anal, vaginal or oral sex, even though we know perfectly well that that’s no more feasible than never having sex at all, for the same reason: for most of us, consistent condom use in every act of sex involving every orifice with every partner type at every age and level of sobriety is not feasible because it is not desirable.

I’m upset that we don’t give more practical and nuanced advice that people are more likely to act on. Example from my response:

“If you don’t have a condom handy, or don’t want to use one, then oral is your safest bet”. More useful still to a random gay man would be: “Do you have HIV? Yes? Then try always to use a condom if you’re top in anal sex. It would be great if you could use one if you’re bottoming too, but it’s less important, especially if you’re good about taking your meds. Don’t worry too much about oral, though it’s best if you don’t come in some other guy’s mouth. Definitely don’t come in his mouth if he’s just been to the dentist, or looks like he needs to go!”

I’m upset that we’re using evidence selectively. The guidelines imply there’s evidence that condoms work, and no evidence that abstinence works. In fact, condoms work and abstinence works even better, when they are used consistently and correctly. The more important evidence is around whether the promotion of condoms or abstinence lead to their consistent and correct use. Frankly, there’s very little recent evidence from the UK that condom promotion works very well; what worked in an age when HIV meant AIDS and an ugly death does not necessarily work in this post-AIDS age.

And I’m upset that, not content with giving clients information they won’t act on, we’re suggesting things that service providers won’t act on either. Sizing your clients up for condoms using a pasta measurer? Really?

I hate to wish HIV a happy 30th birthday, but I think at this rate it can expect to stay alive and well for several decades to come.

It’s a huge disappointment to those who were hoping that the pill-a-day-to-avoid-a-pill-a-day solution might drag us out of the despond that we’ve been in as we contemplate 2.7 million new HIV infections this year. That’s the same number as were newly infected when I started in this business 15 years ago. The only real change is in the cost of our failure: that’s increase over 70-fold.

The study, well conducted by my former employers Family Health International in four countries, is at odds with a study released last November, that showed that a daily dose of Truvada, a combination of two antiretorvirals in pill form, cut the risk of infection among gay men by over 40%. The earlier study did show that — surprise surprise — taking pills to prevent HIV doesn’t work unless you actually take your pills. Though virtually everyone said they took their pills, a later analysis of blood samples showed that wasn’t true. We don’t yet have that same analysis for the new trial in women (dubbed FemPrep), so although 95% reported taking their pills, it’s possible that real adherence was much lower. More than possible: likely. All women in the study were taking contraception, but there was a 9% pregnancy rate, apparently much higher in women on the pill than women on injectibles (we don’t yet have the actual numbers). That suggests that some women aren’t all that good at taking one pill a day (I’m one of them; thank God for implants), let alone two.

There’s a real possibility that antiretrovirals taken through the mouth and processed through the digestive tract aren’t as effective at preventing HIV from finding an entry point in the vagina as they are in the rectum, hence the difference between the trials in straight women and gay men. If that’s the case, it ups the ante for putting ARVs directly into your fanny (using fanny in the English sense!). We know from the Caprissa trials that antiretroviral microbicide works vaginally (though not necessarily rectally). But we only know that it works if you “shoot up” both before and after sex; in theory, at least, that is what was being tried. In practice, we know (well, strongly suspect) how unlikely it is that women will actually do that on a long-term basis. We now desperately need trials of a one-shot vaginal microbicide. Because for all the talk of “bio-medical solutions” the confusing results of recent HIV prevention trials remind us that most bio-medical solutions have a very strong behavioural component. Pills that “work” if you take them are no good if they make you feel so sick, so choked, or so fed up that you don’t take them.

One of the things that pleased me greatly about the FemPrep trials was that researchers made sure that the women who volunteered for the research knew about the disappointing results before the press or the scientific community did. There are more details from the study teams about how they interacted with participants on this interesting conference call, arranged by the ever-helpful AVAC network.

This post must end the way these posts seem always to end, with an underlining of the shockingly high rate of new infections in the study overall: five percent of women became infected, despite the fact that they were given female and male condoms, were regularly screened for other sexually transmitted infections and treated as necessary, and counseled up the wazoo. It’s a reminder of how badly suited the tools in our current toolbox are to the job of HIV prevention, and a caution about expecting much more from other behavioural interventions such as the use of pills or gels.

The answer from the American South (in which New Orleans sits by an accident of geography rather than a convergence of spirit) seems astoundingly last-century. As you can see from the map, it’s also not all that successful.

According to an HIV prevention meeting in Albany, Georgia, the problem is pop music, which makes us drink, which makes us shag. But only if we’re teenagers. Adults are too out of touch to understand deep and meaningful lyrics such as these, from Jamie Foxx’s “Blame It on the Alcohol”.

‘I’ll keep filling up your cup while I feeling on your butt and you don’t even care that I was unaware of how fine you were before my buzz set in.’

Despite the double negatives, that seems pretty straightforward to me. It’s helpfully translated for us by hip and happening youth culture consultant Marc Fomby as ‘I’m the one that has to get drunk to go home with you, in other words you don’t care that I thought you were ugly before you got drunk’.

The solution, obviously, is to tell kids that what their hormones, their instincts, their natural curiousity and very probably the example of their friends, siblings and even parents are suggesting they do is BAD.

“When they come to school they are expecting us, both the students and the parents, to redirect those bad behaviors but we cannot do that unless we can educate them on the dangers of some of the bad things they are doing,” says Barbara Turner, Coordinator for Student Support Services.”

Seventy million people infected with HIV around the world, over half of them already dead. And still, the richest and most scientifically self-congratulory country in the world is pushing the “sex is bad” approach to prevention, and pushing it hardest in the parts of the country where people appear to be at highest risk.

Think I’m kidding? Check out this reworking of abstinence only lessons at work in the US school system (from OMG blog via NL).

I notice that in teens, as in the 20-24 year-olds shown in the earlier map, New York is an outlier in the northeast. (Note that because of CDC’s disgracefully slow surveillance procedures, these data are at least three years old.) More on New York’s new campaign for women and girls shortly.

Predictably, most of the comments on the YouTube site are of the “This stigmatises gay men, especially those with HIV” ilk. More nuanced views over at Towleroad, one of the most consistently rational and informative gay blogs.

The kerfuffle surrounding the Pope´s comments on condoms continues. As the gender of hookers allowed to use condoms switched in translation, the Pope´s spokesman was asked to clarify. Apparently, HIV-infected people can use condoms to protect their partners:

“Whether it’s a man or woman or a transsexual.”

Of all the men I know who regularly wear dresses, Benedict was the last I expected to be embracing the rights of transgenders to protect themselves and their partners from HIV infection.

Many people have commented that as long as reproduction´s not in the picture, he can say whatever he likes about condom use. I´ve yet to hear of a transgendered woman giving birth, so that might be part of the equation here (though note that women who sell sex to men are also encouraged to “take responsibility”). But I’m in an optimistic mood today, and I think the Vatican could be trying to ease open the door to a more rational existence. Miracles just might happen.

It´s official. Taking antiretroviral drugs when you don´t have HIV cuts the risk that you´ll get infected. It´s exciting news, if not unexpected. But it´s going to be a major headache for politicians.

The results of the iPrEx trial, were published today in the New England Journal of Medicine (with pdf but not the supplementary bits here). The trial was among 2470 gay men and 29 transgendered women in six countries. Everyone took a pill a day; half were randomly assigned to take a combination of tenofovir and emtricitabine (sold by a now very happy Gilead under the brand name Truvada), the other half got a placebo. Neither participants nor researchers knew which was which.

The published headline: people who took Truvada were 44% less likely to contract HIV than people who took the dummy pill — an encouraging result, if not stunning. The real headline: people who actually took Truvada nearly all the time were 73% less likely to get HIV: a huge victory. It´s a smaller protective effect than using a condom all the time, of course. The thing is, we know that people aren´t good at using condoms all the time. And what these study results show us is that people aren´t very good at taking a pill every day, either, though they are keen to tell researchers that they do. One of the most striking things about the results was the mismatch between self-reported pill taking and measured levels of active drugs in people´s bodies.

The researchers cleverly did a study within a study to try and figure out how important it was that people dilligently took their pills. Among people who actually got Truvada, they compared intracellular and plasma drug levels in those who got HIV with a random sample of those on Truvada who didn´t get infected. They found that only 9% of those who got infected had measurable levels of the active drugs in their bodies, compared with 51% of those who didn´t get infected. To put it very bluntly, pre-exposure prophylaxis dosn´t work it you don´t take your pills.

Let´s remember that this was a group of men who were poked, prodded, bled and counselled by study staff every FOUR WEEKS, and they still weren´t taking their pills every day. It´s not all that clear why, though men who got the real drug were more likely than those on the fake pills to report nausea. It´s possible that people were less motivated to take their pills if they weren´t sure that they were actually getting real drugs, or even that if they were, the drugs would actually work as prevention. That may also be why guys in the study didn´t report any rise in risk behaviour (though it´s hard to imagine that they could; 80% of them reported at the start of the study that they´d had unprotected anal sex with someone who might be HIV infected). But it´s a worry; if PrEP goes mainstream for gay men, we´ll need a lot more work on how to get people to take their drugs more diligently.

Another major worry: 10 people who tested negative at the start of the study were actually in the very early stages of HIV infection. Both of the 2 who happened to be assigned to the Truvada group developed resistant forms of the virus, suggesting that giving these drugs in the early stages of infection when the virus is replicating very rapidly may fertilise resistant strains. More shocking to me (though less worrying) was that half of the men who had acute early HIV infection at the start of the study had symptoms of the infection, but none were picked up by the study physicians. This is a pet peeve of mine; bad enough in routine health services but nothing short of a disgrace in a study designed specifically to look at HIV infection in high risk men.

Worries about resistance aside, the news seems pretty good. So why do I say it´s a political nightmare? Because antiretroviral drugs are expensive; a lot of people who need them to prolong their lives can´t get them. Now we´re talking about giving them to gay guys so that they can go out and screw around as much as they like without having to think about using the cheaper and potentially more effective (but generally more bothersome) option of condoms. I´ve been a bit sniffy about this myself in the past, though I did spend about 15 years taking a pill every day so that I could have as much sex as I liked without contracting that long-term, life-changing sexually transmitted condition called pregnancy. But in many countries it is still very hard to give out condoms because it is seen to promote promiscuity. If we could figure out a way to improve adherance, putting ARVs on the public tab will probably save money overall. It´s certainly something we should be trying out in all sorts of different ways. That includes the possibility of “disco dosing” — taking pills only on the days when one has a pretty good idea that one´s going to end up barebacking. But as condoms have taught us, the fact that things work technically doesn´t necessarily mean they work in real life, let alone in politics. Even if we can find a better way to deliver pre exposure prophylaxis (implants? it´s what I do instead of pills these days against that other STD, and I love it) I think it is going to be a hard sell in many countries.

For more, see Roger Tatoud´s reflections on the wisdom of taking a pill every day to avoid taking a pill every day.

Still, for now the news is good. Click on the image at the top of this post, add your own positive Truvada story, and get 5 free mp3 downloads. I think it´s worth celebrating a bit while we can.