Transcript
Announcer:
You’re listening to Clinician’s Roundtable on ReachMD. On this episode, we’ll hear from Dr. William Short, who’s an Associate Professor of Clinical Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine in Philadelphia. He’ll be discussing the current challenges and emerging advances in sexually transmitted infection care. Here’s Dr. Short now.
Dr. Short:
STIs remain a persistent public health as well as clinical challenge. To put it simply, it's because the tools we have to prevent STIs and the epidemiology are really moving in the opposite direction, and the question is why? We know that the rates are going up of different STIs and that prevention seems to be lagging behind. We have other things and tools in our armamentarium. They're just not being used. So what is the end result? If you're not seeing a decline and you're not seeing an increased uptake of the use of these tools, you're seeing an increase in their rates, which is what we're seeing. It's being reflected in epidemiologic trends.
So looking at developments that we see from IDWeek or the broader research landscape, I think some of the things that can have an impact on how we approach prevention and management is really digging into the tools that we have in our armamentarium to help shape and modify STI trends. And I think one of the things that comes up pretty much at every conference we see is the use of doxy PEP. We know that's been a very recent shift, and we know what it's done in certain key cities like San Francisco and Seattle. But it's not a universal fix. We need something else. I think one of the key pieces that's missing is, does it work in cisgender women? And we know that the trial in Kenya found that there was no reduction in STIs. And so what can we do there? We need more data on that.
I think on top of everything else, we had this trend of worrying about gonococcal resistance, and I think for the first time, we saw two new drugs that were FDA-approved. And it'd be interesting to see where these are being used now that we have these two new options available. And then really considering combination approaches and what other providers in other areas are doing to combat this problem.
So after reviewing all the challenges, I think it's really plain and simple—well, the words are simple, I should say. What is it going to take for these advances to change the trajectory? Combination prevention is really key. There's not a single silver bullet. So is that pairing the use of doxy PEP with vaccinations, pre-exposure prophylaxis, or other things? We often forget about things such as hepatitis B. Hepatitis B is sexually acquired, and we do have tools. We have vaccinations out there. So it's really about that combination prevention approach that works together to help bring down those rates that we're seeing in clinical practice.
Announcer:
That was Dr. William Short talking about developments that could change how we prevent and manage sexually transmitted infections. To access this and other episodes in our series, visit Clinician’s Roundtable on ReachMD.com, where you can Be Part of the Knowledge. Thanks for listening!
