A statewide survey earlier this year shows that only nine percent of North Carolinians have heard of Pre-exposure Prophylaxis, or PrEP.

PrEP, which was approved by the Center for Disease Control in 2012, is a daily pill that has been shown to prevent HIV transmission when taken consistently.

North Carolina AIDS Action Network executive director Lee Storrow says such low awareness of the drug came at a surprise.

“When you work in the HIV field, it’s really easy to assume everyone has the same information,” says Storrow. “I assumed that there was a low awareness about PrEP in the general population of North Carolina; I will say I did not expect it to be this low and was honestly really, really stunned by this data that we got back.”

According to the survey, once people became aware of PrEP, 55 percent supported local health department programs to help get the medication to low-income, at-risk communities.

While PrEP is still a fairly new drug, Storrow says it is up to the public health community to spread the word.

“I think this really serves, for us as an advocacy community and for public health officials, sort of as a challenge or an alarm to say ‘we are not doing enough to make sure the public knows this information.’”

Gilead, the manufacturer of PrEP, recently began running targeted ads to spread awareness about the drug to make sure high-risk communities are being informed.

“We want to make sure everyone knows about PrEP,” says Storrow. “We also want to make sure that we are tailoring our messages so that people who could really benefit the most from the medication are hearing that information.”

The Orange County Health Department was among the first in the state to institute a program to distribute PrEP.

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