This Week in Sex: CDC Says Undetectable HIV Is Not Transmittable
I read about this a while ago and am glad to see the CDC finally make it official.
This Week in Sex: CDC Says Undetectable HIV Is Not Transmittable
https://rewire.news/article/2017/10/13/twis-undetectable-hiv-is-not-transmittable/
Oct 13, 2017, 2:12pm Martha Kempner
The nation's pre-eminent public health institute makes this overdue announcement; another college gets a vending machine that sells emergency contraception; and Italian ocean trash may tell tales of sex on (or near) the beach.
This Week in Sex is a summary of news and research related to sexual behavior, sexuality education, contraception, STIs, and more.
People With Almost No Viral Load for Six Months Can’t Give the Virus
In a “Dear Colleague” letter marking National Gay Men’s HIV/AIDS Awareness Day in late September, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) noted that HIV-positive people with undetectable viral loads have “effectively no risk of sexually transmitting” the virus. This brings the CDC in line with other AIDS organizations who have been arguing that undetectable is equal to untransmissible.
Undetectable viral loads are the results of improvements in antiretroviral therapy (ART), a combination of drugs used to stop HIV from making of copies of itself. The fewer copies of the virus there are in a person’s body, the less damage it can do to the immune system. A person has reached viral suppression when there are fewer than 200 copies per milliliter of blood or the virus can’t be detected at all.
Research has suggested that when a person reaches viral suppression for six months or longer, they are no longer at risk of transmitting the virus. In its letter, the CDC points out that there have been three different studies that cover “thousands of couples and many thousand acts of sex” that were otherwise unprotected—the couple didn’t use a condom and neither member was taking pre-exposure prophylaxis or PrEP. In these studies, there were no HIV-transmissions from a virally suppressed HIV-positive partner to an HIV-negative partner.
Some see the CDC as slow to make this announcement. Last year, more than 400 organizations worldwide signed a consensus letter stating that “HIV transmission from a person living with HIV (PLHIV), who is on Antiretroviral Therapy (ART) and has achieved an undetectable viral load in their blood for at least six months is negligible to non-existent.”
Nonetheless, advocates are excited that the country’s leading public health organization is now onboard with the message. Eric Sawyer, vice president of public affairs and policy at Gay Men’s Health Crisis, told Healthline: “We’re thrilled that the CDC has endorsed what we and many other HIV/AIDS organizations, researchers, and doctors have known for many years: If you’re HIV positive with an undetectable viral load, there is a negligible risk of HIV transmission.”
As HIV advocates frequently say, “treatment is prevention.” And the effects of treatment are being felt. The CDC notes that between 2010 and 2014, “HIV diagnoses fell among white gay and bisexual men and remained stable among African American gay and bisexual men after years of increases.”.......................................
This Week in Sex: CDC Says Undetectable HIV Is Not Transmittable