MY RECENT COPY OF THE BRITISH MEDICAL JOURNAL tells me that PrEP pills will be freely available to those estimated 1900 people living in Scotland who would benefit from them.Thirty pills cost £400,
so one a day costs nearly £5,000 a year and for the Scottish arm of the NHS that will be £9.5 million out of its annual health budget, a not inconsiderable sum. If the same happens to the rest of the UK could we be looking at £95 million
a year? A vast sum for the over-burdened-creaking-towards-failure NHS to find.
Did I hear you ask, "what are PrEP pills ?" They are called Truvada and are for Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis. They are
highly effective for those who are still HIV negative but expose themselves to HIV positive sexual partners. To be effective they must either take a pill every day, or two pills 24 hours before and three pills in the 48 hours after...leaving aside other considerations
you can just imagine the response to saying to a partner at the height of tumescence, "You'll have to hang on for 24 hours I'm taking my PrEP pills now."
Being very old and stuffy many feel I'm
not entitled to an opinion, but having practised medicine for nigh on half a century and having seen pretty much every aspect of human behaviour, I am, nonetheless, going to express my opinion, and a fig for PC.
In
this situation it's a choice, it's not comparable with, say, a patient in chronic renal failure who costs the NHS thousands a year to stay alive. The HIV negative person could don a condom (condoms are highly effective against HIV transmission AND protect
against other sexually transmitted diseases, which Truvada will not)...OR, and this might be regarded as blasphemy, the HIV negative person could purchase the PrEP pills for protection in their LGBTQ/sex-worker activities. Doesn't that make sense? What do
you think?