Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Gay Men Taking Anti-HIV Drug Are Being Denied Disability Insurance. So They Stop Taking The Medication.
The New York Times: He Took A Drug To Prevent AIDS. Then He Couldn’t Get Disability Insurance.
Three years ago, Dr. Philip J. Cheng, a urology resident at Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, nicked himself while preparing an H.I.V.-positive patient for surgery. Following hospital protocol, he took a one-month course of Truvada, a cocktail of two anti-H.I.V. drugs, to prevent infection. Later, because he was an unattached gay man, he decided to keep taking Truvada to protect himself from getting H.I.V. through sex. (McNeil, 2/12)
In other news —
The Associated Press: Can Gene Therapy Be Harnessed To Fight The AIDS Virus?
For more than a decade, the strongest AIDS drugs could not fully control Matt Chappell's HIV infection. Now his body controls it by itself, and researchers are trying to perfect the gene editing that made this possible. Scientists removed some of his blood cells, disabled a gene to help them resist HIV, and returned these "edited" cells to him in 2014. So far, it has given the San Francisco man the next best thing to a cure. (Marchione, 2/13)
