Michael Specter welcomes some great news:
A new study, of eighteen hundred couples on four continents, has shown that H.I.V.-positive people on antiretrovirals are ninety-six per cent less likely to infect their sexual partners than H.I.V.-positive people who are not on those drugs. Intuitively, that makes sense, because antiretrovirals lower the amount of virus in the bloodstream. Yet hunches, even smart hunches, often prove false. … The results, released [last week] by U.S. federal health officials, were so unequivocal that the study has been stopped four years early.
Well: duh. It has been pretty obvious from the get-go that people with HIV on the full retroviral Monty are much less infectious than those untreated. I've made this intuitive case for many years. But it's almost fifteen years since the cocktail transformed so many lives. Why has it taken this long for a major study to reach this conclusion and put it into effect?
I suspect one reason is that the public health authorities did not want to give gay men any indication that sex was any safer now than it has been since the 1980s, for fear of unleashing a new wave of sex and disease. But science is always a better bet than getting men to restrain sexual desire in impeding an epidemic. Both would be great, of course, in stemming the virus's spread, along with sero-sorting, in which HIV-positive men do their best to have sex only withn HIV-positive men. But I wonder what the full effect would be if all men diagnosed with HIV were immediately put on retrovirals and all HIV-negative men were put on a basic anti-retroviral at the same time.
I bet you'd see a sizable decline in HIV transmission.
The Dish 