Swiss change safe sex message on HIV (AP)
Posted by admin on Jan 31, 2008
The proposal astonished AIDS researchers in Europe and North America who have long argued that safe sex with a condom is the single out most effective way of preventing the spread of the disease — apart from abstinence.
“Not only is (the Swiss proposal) dangerous, it’s misleading and it is not considering the implications of the biological facts involved with HIV transmission,” said Jay Levy, director of the Laboratory for Tumor and AIDS Virus Research at the University of California in San Francisco.
The Swiss National AIDS Commission related patients who can satisfy strict conditions, including successful antiretroviral treatment to suppress the virus and who do not have any other sexually transmitted diseases, do not pose a danger to others. The proposal was published this week in the Bulletin of Swiss Medicine.
The Swiss scientists took as their starting point a 1999 do one’s best by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and hindrance, which showed that transmission depends strongly on the viral freight in the blood.
The other studies had also found that patients on regular AIDS treatment did not pass on the venom, and that HIV could not be detected in their genital fluids.
“Let’s be clear, the decision has to remain with the HIV-negative member of a partnership,” said Pietro Vernazza, head of infectious diseases at the cantonal hospital of St. Gallen in Switzerland and an author of the declare.
The studies cited by the Swiss commission did not themselves definitively conclude whether people through HIV and on antiretroviral treatment could safely have unprotected sex without passing on the virus.
The World Health Organization declared Switzerland would be the capital country in the world to try this draw near.
“There is still some concern that you can never guarantee that somebody will not subsist poisoning, and the evidence I have to say is not conclusive,” said Charlie Gilks, superintendent of AIDS treatment and prevention at WHO.
“We are not going to be changing in any way our very clear recommendations that the masses on treatment stay to practice safer sex, including protected sex with a condom, in any relationship,” he added.
In any case, of the 2 million people worldwide now receiving HIV treatment, only a very small number receive medical worry comparable to that in Switzerland, Gilks declared.