Everyone diagnosed with HIV should be offered the option to start treatment within seven days of diagnosis and everyone who feels ready should have the option to start treatment on the day of diagnosis, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has recommended. The new guidance was issued on the opening day of the 9th International AIDS Society Conference on HIV Science (IAS 2017) in Paris.
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Tags: HIV Treatment, Treatment as Prevention, Living with HIV, International AIDS Conference

HIV transmission has reached a new record high of 244 cases in New Zealand in 2016. This follows a consistent upward trend that has been happening since 2011. Most of the cases 159 or 65% were amongst men who have sex with men with the majority 98 or 61.6% of these infections taking place within New Zealand. Amongst the Heterosexual population there were 42 new diagnoses with 11 of these infections being local.

For people not diagnosed and infected locally they may have been living with HIV for a period of time and have been engaged in care elsewhere and have just returned to New Zealand (from Australia or the UK for example) and their diagnosis is defined as “new” to New Zealand. We will always have these types of new diagnosis as people are allowed to migrate to NZ while living with HIV – which is a good thing. Read More...

Tags: HIV Transmission, Living with HIV, PrEP, Treatment as Prevention

Body Positive is celebrating the most significant development in the HIV world since the advent of effective combination therapy 20 years ago – people living with HIV who maintain undetectable viral loads through adherence to treatment can confidently declare to their sexual partners “I’m not infectious!”  Read More...

Tags: HIV Transmission, HIV Treatment, Adherence, Treatment as Prevention, Living with HIV

A community-based sexual health clinic in San Francisco has offered nurse-led pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) services to more than 1200 clients and has seen no HIV infections to date, according to a presentation last month at the 21st International AIDS Conference (AIDS 2016) in Durban, South Africa. Read More...

Tags: Study, PrEP, Treatment as Prevention

Odds of seeing a transmission now even lower, but more data still needed on gay men, say researchers

The PARTNER study, which two years ago created headlines by establishing that the chance of an HIV-positive person with an undetectable viral load transmitting their virus was very low and quite possibly zero, released new data at the 21st International AIDS Conference (AIDS 2016) that further refined this estimate. Read More...

Tags: Study, HIV Transmission, Treatment as Prevention

An Australian-based study of gay male couples of opposite HIV status (serodifferent couples) has so far seen no transmissions from the HIV-positive partner within the couple in a two-year interim analysis.

The Opposites Attract study started recruiting in May 2012. It recruits gay male serodifferent couples regardless of whether the HIV-positive partner is on antiretroviral therapy (ART) or has an undetectable viral load, and also regardless of whether or not they use condoms. Read More...

Tags: Study, HIV Transmission, Treatment as Prevention

The most exciting news from CROI concerns pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), the use by HIV-negative people of antiretrovirals to prevent HIV infection.

Two studies of PrEP in gay men and trans women have demonstrated that the availability of PrEP reduced the rate of infection by 86%. This amounts to the highest effectiveness yet seen for PrEP and is superior to most other HIV prevention interventions. Extraordinarily, two separate studies which provided PrEP in very different ways found exactly the same level of effectiveness. Read More...

Tags: Treatment as Prevention, PrEP, Study

The Steering Committee of the PROUD trial of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) in gay men in England announced today that participants currently on the deferred arm of the study, who have not yet started PrEP, will be recalled to their clinics and offered the opportunity to begin PrEP ahead of schedule. This is because the effectiveness seen in the trial has exceeded the threshold set for trial continuation.

Although the exact effectiveness seen in the trial is yet to be established pending analysis and follow-up of participants, the indications are that it is considerably in excess of that originally anticipated by the researchers. Read More...

Tags: Treatment as Prevention, PrEP

A study that estimates the risk that someone living with HIV and taking antiretroviral therapy could transmit the virus reports that, on the basis of the few transmissions from heterosexual partners on treatment that have been reported, it is not possible to dismiss the risk of infection as zero.

The analysis by French researchers in Clinical Infectious Diseases estimates that the highest-likely risk of HIV being transmitted is between 8.7 and 13 transmissions per 100,000 sex acts; in other words, from one in about 11,500 to one in about 7700 acts. However, the researchers stressed to aidsmap.com that this is the highest-likely risk: the actual risk may be lower than this and could indeed be zero. Read More...

Tags: HIV Transmission, Treatment as Prevention