PETALING JAYA: Several AIDS related foundations have spoken out against the call by a group of local medical experts for the Health Ministry to review its plans to scale up the use of pre-exposure prophylaxis to curb the spread of HIV.
The Health Ministry is planning to dispense PrEP for free at public health clinics in the Klang Valley, Selangor, Johor, Penang, and Sabah beginning next month. Dr Rafidah Hanim and several university professors published a statement in an online portal on Dec 6, expressing concern that scaling up the use of PrEP among MSM would disrupt the moral fabric of Malaysian society, including resulting in high economic cost.
Prof Adeeba noted that the blatant objection to the use of PrEP for the MSM community did not reflect the current reality of the HIV epidemic in Malaysia. She cited a recent study in Australia involving 10,000 PrEP users which showed that the new rate of HIV transmission decreased by almost 90%.