Embodied, clinical and pharmaceutical uncertainty: people with HIV anticipate the feasibility of HIV treatment as prevention (TasP)

Keogh, Peter (2017). Embodied, clinical and pharmaceutical uncertainty: people with HIV anticipate the feasibility of HIV treatment as prevention (TasP). Critical Public Health, 27(1) pp. 63–74.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/09581596.2016.1187261

Abstract

Evidence of the efficacy of HIV treatment as prevention (TasP) precipitated a highly optimistic global response and a radical redesign of HIV policy. Sociologists and others have framed TasP within promissory or enterprising discourses which require HIV prevention planners and people with HIV to engage in anticipatory assessments of risk and uncertainty. In 2013, I conducted focus groups with people with HIV in London, UK, to explore their understandings and anticipations of TasP. An environment of economic constraint obliged participants to triage clinical need and presentation, and they expressed scepticism about the sustainability of pharmaceutical investment in treatment innovation. These perceptions were informed by an embodied knowledge of HIV which implies a construction of health as a form of capital that is finite and must be conserved. This is contrasted with a biomedical construction of health as a form of capital that can be exponentially generated through investment. The imperative of conservation entailed by people with HIV’s anticipations contrasts with the speculative economy of biomedical production entailed in planners’ anticipations of TasP. Rather than researching ‘TasP acceptability’ and considering whether people with HIV’s behaviours constitute an obstacle to TasP’s effectiveness, we should recognise that people with HIV are already involved in shaping what TasP is, what it will be and ultimately how it ‘works’.

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