Only a small portion of Americans who could benefit from taking a daily pill for HIV prevention filled prescriptions for the medication in 2015, according to a CDC analysis presented March 6 at the annual Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Boston.
For the analysis, researchers examined a national prescription database to determine the number of prescriptions filled for pre-exposure prophylaxis in commercial pharmacies in 2015. While the CDC estimates 1.1 million Americans are at substantial risk for contracting HIV, just 90,000 PrEP prescriptions were filled in 2015.
The greatest room for improvement in PrEP coverage exists in the African-American and Latino communities. While 500,000 African-Americans and nearly 300,000 Latinos could have benefited from PrEP in 2015, they filled just 7,000 and 7,600 PrEP prescriptions, respectively. Substantially more whites took PrEP in 2015, but the gap between how many whites could have benefited from PrEP and how many received it was significant. In total, 300,000 whites could have benefited from the treatment, but this group filled just 42,000 prescriptions in 2015.
"One of our most powerful tools for HIV prevention remains largely on pharmacy shelves," said Jonathan Mermin, MD, director of CDC's National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention. "PrEP can be a potent prescription that strengthens prevention options for people who are at high risk for HIV infection."