Public health ethics analysis highlights arguments against doxycycline pre-exposure prophylaxis, indicating potential risks of antimicrobial resistance in the population.
In September 2023, the Australasian Society for HIV, Viral Hepatitis and Sexual Health Medicine recommended doxycycline pre-exposure prophylaxis to prevent STIs in gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men. However, expanding antibiotic use carries the risk of propagating antimicrobial resistance among target STIs and non-target pathogens, prompting some experts to advocate withholding doxycycline pre-exposure prophylaxis until further research is done. Thus, the use of doxycycline pre-exposure prophylaxis is a question of whether the risk of antimicrobial resistance to the population is justified by the health benefits to gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men. Here, we outline the public health ethics cases for and against this strategy.
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Iyer et al. (2025) studied this question.
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