Sydney — Kyle, a 29-year-old Sydneysider, never knew a time when HIV wasn’t a persistent and pernicious threat — until he began popping a pill to prevent it. The blue, oval-shaped antiviral tablet, known as Truvada, that Kyle takes daily is the subject of a study in Australia’s New South Wales state that, in less than a year, has helped drive new cases of the AIDS-causing human immunodeficiency virus among gay and bisexual men to the lowest since 1985. "It feels good to be a part of that," says Kyle, a retail assistant who joined a programme called pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, in January to ease his fear about being infected with HIV during sex on the occasions he doesn’t use a condom. "I do feel a lot safer." Thirty-six years after a rare lung infection in gay men in Los Angeles heralded the start of the AIDS epidemic in North America, the deadly disease is firmly in retreat globally. For the first time, more than half of all people living with HIV are on virus-suppressing tr...
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