World AIDS Day is a great opportunity to remind people that HIV is still here.
There are currently 1.2 million people living with HIV in the U.S. and 32,000 new cases every year.
Data shows that 52% of new HIV cases every year are in the south, according to Dr. Kimberly Smith with Viiv Healthcare.
Since the 1990s, there has been tremendous progress in preventing and treating HIV.
The problem remains though, not everybody has access to the medicines or is taking advantage of them.
TESTING
First of all, know your status.
Testing is free at sites like Legacy Community Health and Avenue 360, along with many others.
MEDICATIONS
There are ways to prevent and treat infections.
Dr. Smith said there are a variety of medicines that can make the virus in your body *undetectable* (like PrEP / APRETUDE).
If you get on treatment and get your virus undetectable, you don’t transmit it to your partners.
“You know, when we first learned about HIV, it was pretty much uniformly terminal. And then when we got the first medicines for HIV, they were very complicated, and you had to take multiple pills a day and they had a lot of side effects. But nowadays, we have much better medicines where you can take as little as one pill a day, and even in some cases you can take a dose by injection only every two months... that injection every two months is called APRETUDE,” Dr. Smith explained.