December 1st, Superheroes of Prevention in the ARCIGAY Campaign for World AIDS Day
Bologna, November 30, 2019 – “Sexheroes: All the sex you want, with the superpowers you want” is the social media campaign that Arcigay created for World AIDS Day. The various prevention tools—PrEP, PEP, TasP, condoms, femidoms, oral dams, vaccines—become superheroes, with their specific powers that reduce our vulnerability to various sexually transmitted infections. Indeed, effective protection against HIV is increasingly possible thanks to new pharmacological strategies represented by Miss PrEP, the therapy that can be used by those who do not have HIV and which works as a barrier, and Miss TasP, the strategy that makes people with HIV non-infectious by reducing their virus to undetectable levels, as also certified by the recent Italian Consensus Conference on Undetectable = Untransmittable. But then there are other strategies, sometimes little known, which unlike the previous ones also work against viral infections other than HIV (hepatitis, HPV and herpes), and against bacterial infections such as syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia: therefore not only condoms, Mister Condom, but also Super Femidom, a kind of condom that is inserted into the vagina or anus, or Captain Dam, the oral dam can be used for oral sex in which parts such as the vagina and anus are licked. And finally Captain Vax, the vaccination strategy that acts as a barrier against HAV and HBV, responsible for hepatitis A and B, and, with due distinctions, against HPV, responsible for condylomas and cancers. "As we've been saying for some time," explains Michele Breveglieri, Head of Health and HIV Prevention at Arcigay, "prevention in sex is now a combined process: each need for pleasure must correspond to the most appropriate and sustainable prevention tool for the individual. In addition to the need to disseminate and consolidate powerful strategies like PrEP and TasP against HIV, it's also important to increase awareness of prevention methods for other sexually transmitted infections.".
