Quote: (09-20-2018 10:51 PM)CleanSlate Wrote:
This whole thread made me curious about transmission risk of HIV when the viral load is high from an initial infection.
Here's a chart showing the risk of transmission for both male and female in all types of sexual encounters.
http://www.poz.com/pdfs/P04-14p53.risk_transmission.pdf
Assuming there was no anal, the risk to the male is a 0.38% chance of contracting HIV from an infected female in a low income country.
BUT if you read the fine print under increased risk, if the female has a high viral load from a recent infection, the likelihood of transmission increases by 26 times.
So take that 0.38% number and multiply it by 26, and you get 9.88%.
This means that, outside of the West or high-income countries, the male has a nearly 10% chance per encounter of catching HIV from a female who has recently been infected!
This number rises to 37% for anal sex.
It's difficult to catch HIV, but it's not as close to impossible for straights as we think it is.
Be careful out there.
Keep in mind those probabilities are not independent events. Risk increases with more partners. One of the major public health issues in the HIV/AIDS epidemic was trying to eliminate (or at least regulate) locations where men could have sex with vast numbers of men in one or two evenings.
Actually, my doctoral work focuses on the history of venereal disease, so this is an area of some real interest for me.
If you're not fucking her, someone else is.