I Am Men’s Health

Abstract

In 2012, the US Food and Drug Administration approved Truvada as a pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) for adults at risk of HIV. PrEP is highly effective at preventing HIV when taken daily, but no gold standard exists for consistently administering PrEP to populations at highest risk. The “I Am Men’s Health” program used an innovative methodology to generate adherence to PrEP in 23 mostly young men who have sex with men of color (yMSMc), during a 28-week period from February to September 2013. Adherence was measured using weekly medication pickup rates. The average age of the participants was 21 years, and the majority were black and lived below the poverty line. Time on PrEP ranged from 1 to 28 weeks (2723 person-days), and the weighted average adherence was 73%. The methodology used in this study was preliminarily effective at generating adherence to PrEP among high-risk yMSMc in a community setting and may help inform large-scale future HIV prevention interventions.