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Greg Owen was looking for a drug to avoid becoming HIV-positive. But it was too late: I already had the virus. Nevertheless, he and a friend have embarked on an ambitious project to help thousands of people receive the new treatment.
Greg Owen grew up in Belfast, the eldest of six children, in the 1980s. He says that he was "very gay".
In 2015, Greg lived in London. He worked in bars and clubs and slept on couches of friends.
He never imagined that one day he would become the man who would save thousands of lives and change the way the British National Health Service
All began when Greg met Alex Craddock
"He was cute and a little cheeky, I liked him a bit," Greg says.
Alex was coming back from New York, and had something that interested Greg: PrEP a relatively new drug in the fight against HIV
If you take PrEP the right way and you have bad with an HIV-positive person, the drug is almost 100% effective in preventing infections, even if you do not use a condom.
Greg was intrigued. According to Alex, the drug was very easy to obtain in New York. However was not available in the United Kingdom .
At that time, the rate of HIV diagnosis was increasing in the United Kingdom. One in eight homobaduals in London had HIV.
PrEP is the abbreviation for pre-exposure prophylaxis, and is a pill taken before penetrational bad .
Some people take it every day, while others take it ingest the days before and after bad.
If someone does not use a condom and comes into contact with HIV, this medicine prevents the virus from getting into the bloodstream. It is important to remember that PrEP is a prevention method, not a cure.
But before taking PrEP, you must make sure you do not have HIV.
Greg managed to get a small amount of this drug
He was not very worried because he had been regularly tested for badually transmitted diseases
Greg knew how it worked: The test kit would show one point if it was negative and two if it was positive
The shock when the kit showed two points was total.
"The doctor has nothing to tell me, because we both knew what it meant," remembered "I felt lonely and trapped, when I went out and saw people go by, I felt that there was something separating me from the rest of the world. "
It was then that he made the decision that would change his life and that of thousands of gay men.
He decided that he was going to reveal his secret to the world. So he posted on Facebook that he was HIV-positive, and he said what he knew about PrEP the drug that almost nobody knew and that would have prevented the infection .
Her phone started ringing immediately
"Everyone started asking me where this drug could be obtained."
It is at this point that Greg and Alex had an idea.
"We decided we did not need the government," Alex says. "So we created a website where people could order the drug online."
"We wrote all the medical information that people needed to know and we connected users to buyers. We did not want to make money, just give people a chance to buy the pill, "Greg says.
It was a simple but radical idea
They called the website "I want PrEP now" ( I want PrEP now.)
400 people visited the site web at 24 hours later, it has become incredibly popular.
It is then that the medical community is interested in them.
Mags Portman, consultant for the British National Health Service, emailed Greg to meet him
All studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of PrEP.
Still, the British National Health Service refused to prescribe it.
"As a doctor, it was very frustrating to know that this treatment existed and we could not prescribe it," says Mags.
But what began as a Web site ended up in the courts.
The legal case was complex. The National Health Service argued that did not have legally to fund prevention.
But for Greg, the question went further. "Gay men have the right to have bad without fear, guilt and disease."
"We are conditioned to believe that love, especially bad between two men, must always have a price And it's not like that."
The National Health Service lost the case in November 2016. It must now badume responsibility for PrEP.
Greg was working in a Northern Ireland pub when he heard the decision. "I could not stop crying while I was serving a beer to a guy from Belfast, who was probably thinking that he was crazy."
What has happened since?
In August 2017, the English National Health Service announced would provide the drug to 10,000 persons for a trial period that would last three years. In addition, many more men buy the drug privately, thanks to better awareness.
For the first time in recent years, the HIV diagnosis rate among homobadual men has decreased.
From 2015 to 2016, it has been reduced by 20% throughout England. In some clinics in London it dropped by 40%.
Although there are also people who oppose drugs . According to some studies, PrEP could encourage bad without a condom in homobadual men
Greg is still excited when he thinks about what he has accomplished.
"My goal was very humble. A person avoided what happened to me. "
In the end saved thousands of people from being infected with the virus.
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