Thanks for the link to the article in psychology today.
I will be one of the first ones to agree with the article in that HIV did not spread across the world as first thought (lucky for us). When HIV was first discovered the cases were accelerating at an unbelievable rate and there was a real worry that this would continue.
As time has gone we have seen, that even though HIV passes through vaginal and rectal sex that its not super infectious which means you need a few exposures lets say 1 in 1000 for HIV to be passed to you. This means that you need a network of people that are having sex with each other on a frequent basis for HIV to take hold in a community.
I am not sure what statistics they were working on but for such large numbers I think they were just combining your one time chance of getting HIV with how common HIV is in western countries.
I think this way of calculating chances is not very helpful for people on an individual basis. Either you had sex with someone who had HIV or did not have HIV. If they don't have HIV there is no risk to HIV at all. If they have HIV there is a chance HIV could be passed to you depending on what type of sex you had as well as other factors e.g. is it a new HIV infection, are they taking HIV medication etc...
I can't believe they wrote “men almost never get HIV from women” , I guess they ignored the data that most of the men in the world had HIV passed to them from a woman and most woman had HIV passed to them from a man.
There are some countries where HIV has devastated the entire population but for most countries HIV has only hit networks of people were transmission can take place. A few examples of this is.
- people who inject drugs and share needles (and their sexual partners). (HIV passing from blood shared through shared needles or drug equipment)
- Sex workers and their customers. (HIV passing through unprotected vaginal and rectal sex)
- Men who have sex with men. (HIV passing from unprotected rectal sex)
What we have learnt from this is that it seems that HIV just stays in the high risk network and does not have a way of getting into the general population. For example in many Asian countries what you find is sex workers and their customers are having sex in a way which passes HIV which results in sex workers and their customers having high rates of HIV. This HIV then can pass to say the wives of the men who see sex workers but then stops there as it seems the wives are not having frequent risky sex with multiple partners.
To bring this back to a local level this is the same thing we are seeing in BC were HIV seems to be low in the general population but higher in networks of people were HIV is being passed on. Some examples of this are.
- In BC people who inject drugs and share needles (or drug using equipment) and their sexual partners are at higher risk. In Vancouver a study done in 2008 showed a 18.2% HIV prevalence rate in a group of people who were injecting drugs.
- In BC we are seeing a HIV prevalence rate approaching 20% for men who are having sex with men.
Now for the numbers you have all been waiting for what does HIV look like in BC for the people that do sex work indoors and their customers. There have been very little research on this so all I have to go off is the experience of our outreach program and one research study.
Just released is an article titled “Community-Based HIV and STI Prevention in Woman Working in Indoor Sex Markets” The research was carried out in massage parlours located in the lower mainland between 2006 and 2009 they recruited 129 participants and of this 113 agreed to get tested. No one tested positive to HIV. This has also been the experience of our outreach team who works at the bute street clinic and who also did outreach to the massage parlours. Within indoor sex work and their customers it appears HIV is very low.
I just would like to congratulate everyone on this fantastic achievement. It really shows that people can have sex with multiple partners and stop HIV from taking a hold in their community by either using condoms or having sex in a way that does not have a high chance of passing HIV.:clap2::clap2:
You just need to be careful how you think when you get this data. For example I have seen some people at the clinic who say they are not concerned about sex that could pass HIV because the HIV prevalence is so low. This may work for one individual but when more and more people do this the effect is lost.
We have seen this over the last few years with mumps and whooping cough in the lower mainland. People have decided not to get their kids vaccinated against mumps or whooping cough because we were not seeing any outbreaks of these. If just one person did not get vaccinated it would not be a problem but as more and more people did not get vaccinated we started seeing outbreaks again of whooping cough and mumps.
HN
www.smartsexresource.com
