Promising HIV prevention

Treatment can't solve the problem, but adding a couple of new tools to the fully scaled-up implementation of available HIV prevention options could cut the global HIV infection rate in half.

The recent announcement that a pill currently used to treat HIV infection can also help prevent it was an important milestone in the effort to keep people from getting the virus.

The breakthrough utilizes a strategy known as pre-exposure prophylaxis. At-risk people take a drug in advance of exposure to the pathogen that makes it less likely they will become infected.