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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 would never have imagined that someday he would become the man who would save thousands of lives and change the way the British health service treats gays. 19659003] 
It all started 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 someone who has HIV, the drug is almost 100% effective to avoid getting infected 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, it was not available in the United Kingdom
At the time, the rate of HIV diagnosis was increasing in the United Kingdom. One in eight homobaduals in London had HIV
PrEP is an abbreviation for pre-exposure prophylaxis, and is a taken pill before penetrative bad.
Some people take it every day, while others ingest it 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 have to make sure you do not have HIV. 19659003 Gregory managed to obtain a small amount of this drug.
He was not very worried, since he had been regularly examined for badually transmitted diseases
Greg knew how it worked: the test kit would show a point if it was negative and two s & ds It was positive
The shock when the kit showed two points was total.
"The doctor had nothing to tell me, because we both knew what it meant", remember "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 to change his life and that of thousands of homobadual 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 recounted what he knew about PrEP, a drug that almost no one knew and that could have prevented the infection.
His phone started ringing immediately.
[19659003] "Everyone started to wonder where this drug could be obtained."
It was at this point that Greg and Alex had an idea
"We decided we did not need the government ". "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 the users to the buyers, we did not want to earn any money." # 39; money. "
It was a simple but radical idea.
They called the website" I want PrEP now ".
400 people visited the site at 24 hours and quickly became incredibly popular.
It was then that the medical community became interested in them.
Mags Portman, a consultant from the British National Health Service, sent an email All Studies have shown the effectiveness of PrEP
Still, the British National Health Service refused to prescribe it.
"As a doctor, it was very frustrating. know that this treatment existed and we could not prescribe it, "says Mags.
But what began as a website ended up in court.
The legal case was complex. The National Health Service argued that it was not 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.
The National Health Service lost the case in November 2016. It must now take responsibility for PrEP
Greg was working in a pub in Northern Ireland when he heard "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 that would provide the drug to 10,000 people during a trial period that would last three years.In addition, many more men buy the drug privately, through increased awareness.
For the first time in recent years, the diagnosis rate of HIV among homobadual men has decreased
from 20 15 to 2016, reduced by 20% in all of England. In some clinics in London, it has dropped by 40%.
Although there are also people who oppose the drug. According to some studies, PrEP could encourage bad without a condom in homobadual men
Greg is always excited when he thinks about what he has accomplished.
"My goal was very humble.A person avoided what happened to me."
Eventually, he saved thousands of people from infection with the virus.
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