That article in McClean’s, by the way, is really poor. The reporter’s research seems to have been limited to interviewing a handful of individual HIV clinicians and some people living with HIV or at-risk for HIV infection.

He could have done a much better job if he’d talked to some epidemiologists.

He’s making the classic layman’s error of conflating individual risk with population risk.

Certainly the risk for HIV infection per sexual incident is very, very low — per person.

But per population, the risk is very, very high.

If it weren’t, the twenty percent of some populations in Africa wouldn’t be HIV positive.

Epidemiologists like the ones at the US CDC and Health Canada are urging widespread use of PrEP because they can see that from a population perspective, it makes a lot of sense.

It’s disappointing that such a good magazine printed such a poorly researched article.