The Voice (Francistown)
Gontse Gareebine
29 April 2008
Francistown — The ongoing BOTUSA Study (TDF2 HIV PREVENTION STUDY) is going well. The trial started last year with the engagement of sexually active volunteers aged between 18 and 29 for a clinical trial to see if a pill already used by people living with HIV&AIDS in Europe and United States would prevent infection.
In an interview with The Voice, Botusa Senior Clinical Research Scientist, Dr. Poloko Kebaabetswe, and Dr. Michael Thigpen, the overseer of the center's HIV Prevention Research, revealed that all was on track.
BOTUSA is a collaboration of the centers for disease control of both the Botswana and US governments.
In a period of a year since the study took off, BOTUSA revealed that the volunteers have been forth coming, both males and females; and, because of this, they have successfully screened the number of volunteers they wanted.
So far though, 427 men and women who are closely monitored, are on a placebo and the trial pill Truvada, a combination of Tenofovir (TDF) and Emtricitabine (FTC), which prevents HIV from growing and spreading in the body. Of these, 50 percent are getting Truvada, while the rest receive a placebo so that at the end of the study, the two groups will be compared. If Truvada works, there will be less HIV infection in the Truvada group.
As a pre-exposure prophylaxis, (PrEP) a medical term for prevention, Truvada works in a way that people who take it are protected with antibodies that will avoid infection in case they come in contact with an HIV infected component.
All those who are participating in the study that is yet to bear results, are continually being given free condoms, behavioural change and risk reduction counselling, as well as free sexually transmitted infection examinations and treatment. The TDF2 trial is expected to end towards the end of 2009 where 1,200 participants would have been enrolled in the study.
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