From HIV.gov…
Since PrEP is one of the newer HIV prevention tools, understanding more about who is using it is important to better tailoring HIV prevention efforts at the national, state, and community levels. PrEP, or pre-exposure prophylaxis, is when people at high risk for HIV take HIV medicine daily to lower their chances of getting infected with HIV. AIDSVu has released the first-ever publicly available data and interactive maps of PrEP use by state from 2012 through 2016, stratified by sex and age.
The new maps from AIDSVu show more than 77,000 people were prescribed PrEP in 2016, with an average 73 percent increase year over year in persons using PrEP across the U.S. from 2012 – when the drug TDF/FTC was approved by the FDA for use as PrEP – to 2016. However, approximately 1.1 million people in the U.S. are at substantial risk for HIV exposure and could benefit from PrEP, according to analysis presented by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) at CROI 2018 earlier this year.
The data presented on AIDSVu reveal that the growth and distribution of PrEP use has been inconsistent across different sexes, age groups, and geographic regions. For example, the Southern U.S. accounted for more than half (52 percent) of all new HIV diagnoses in 2016 but represented only 30 percent of all PrEP users in 2016. That same year, women comprised 19 percent of all new HIV diagnoses but made up only seven percent of all PrEP users.