{"id":151,"date":"2008-01-30T22:11:00","date_gmt":"2008-01-31T02:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rawtop.com\/blog\/?p=151"},"modified":"2008-01-30T22:11:00","modified_gmt":"2008-01-31T02:11:00","slug":"neg-guys-barebacking-with-poz-guys-safe-sex","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rawtop.com\/sex\/2008-01\/neg-guys-barebacking-with-poz-guys-safe-sex","title":{"rendered":"Neg Guys Barebacking With Poz Guys = Safe Sex"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Last night I wrote a post saying I think <a href=\"http:\/\/rawtop.com\/sex\/2008\/01\/imo-most-neg-bareback-bottoms-are-poz.html\">most &#8220;neg&#8221; bareback bottoms are actually poz<\/a>. Now today the big news is that poz bottoms are now neg&#8230; At least in Switzerland&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>OK, not exactly, but&#8230; This one is big, so pay attention&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-style: italic;\">[See the update at the end of this post&#8230;]<\/span><\/p>\n<p>The Swiss Federal Commission for HIV \/ AIDS has put out their <a href=\"http:\/\/aidsmap.com\/en\/news\/4E9D555B-18FB-4D56-B912-2C28AFCCD36B.asp\">first ever consensus statement<\/a> saying they all agree that <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">HIV-positive individuals on effective antiretroviral therapy and without sexually transmitted infections (STIs) are sexually non-infectious.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s right &#8211; you can&#8217;t get HIV from a poz guy if <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">all<\/span> of the following are true:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>the person adheres to antiretroviral therapy, the effects of which must be evaluated regularly by the treating physician<\/li>\n<li>the viral load has been suppressed (<><\/li>\n<li>there are no other sexually transmitted infections<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>That&#8217;s huge&#8230; They&#8217;re comparing this pronouncement to the statement many years ago that you can&#8217;t get HIV by kissing someone. It&#8217;s impossible to prove it for certain, but they&#8217;re unable to find any evidence that it&#8217;s wrong.<\/p>\n<p>This has a lot of implications. In yesterday&#8217;s post I was saying that I didn&#8217;t think barebacking with poz bottoms was all that much more risky than barebacking with neg bottoms since the neg bottoms could have just converted and be highly infectious &#8211; looks like I was right on target &#8211; at least for guys who have been poz for a while and are on meds.<\/p>\n<p>It also has implications for serodiscordant (poz\/neg) relationships&#8230; Those couples can now breathe a sigh of relief &#8211; and even &#8220;safely&#8221; bareback each other. They just have to keep on top of those viral loads and avoid STDs for both partners.<\/p>\n<p>But curiously it puts the burden for protecting the community onto the poz guys.  I worry a little bit that there will be a pressure for poz guys to take meds earlier and earlier to get viral loads down to absolute zero and stay there. I&#8217;m not sure that&#8217;s completely fair, but the flip side is that I expect this will have poz guys feeling a bit better about the social implications of being poz.<\/p>\n<p>And I&#8217;m guessing you&#8217;ll start seeing &#8220;undetectable for X months&#8221; in profiles to signal to neg guys that the poz guy is &#8220;safe&#8221;. In a way, this almost makes the poz guy safer than some neg guys to have sex with since the risk is more controlled and predictable. Wouldn&#8217;t it be weird if neg guys started preferring poz guys &#8217;cause it was safer than it is with neg guys&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>This does change the whole landscape of &#8220;safe sex&#8221;. Any guesses how long it will take the &#8220;condom nazis&#8221; to pick up on this news?<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-style: italic;\">UPDATE:<\/span><\/p>\n<p><a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"y!\" href=\"http:\/\/news.yahoo.com\/s\/afp\/20080130\/hl_afp\/switzerlandhealthdiseaseaids_080130205941\">The news is now out a day later<\/a> that the Swiss researchers only looked at studies with heterosexuals in drawing their conclusions. So presumably most of the sex behind the studies was vaghttp:\/\/www.blogger.com\/img\/gl.link.gifinal sex, not anal. [What were they thinking?]<\/p>\n<p>So what does this mean for us gay guys giving and getting cum up the ass? I think the straight studies are parallels. In other words, if you can say conclusively that straight bareback sex with a poz partner is &#8220;safe&#8221; then you can say that gay sex with a poz partner is &#8220;relatively low risk&#8221;. In other words what they&#8217;ve shown is that the viral load of the poz partner makes a difference. That&#8217;s not going to change for gay guys, but it may not reduce the risk down to, or close to, zero in our case.<\/p>\n<p>For me, it&#8217;s about relative risk and I still feel comfortable in hooking up with poz guys with undetectable viral loads. It may not be zero risk, but it&#8217;s relatively low risk and consistent. You&#8217;ll each need to make your own decisions. Hopefully they&#8217;ll look at the data for anal sex and give us a statement on that as well&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-style:italic;\">UPDATE 2:<\/span> Please see my post on <a href=\"http:\/\/rawtop.com\/sex\/2008\/02\/update-on-swiss-statement-about.html\">the video one of the authors of the statement gave<\/a>&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last night I wrote a post saying I think most &#8220;neg&#8221; bareback bottoms are actually poz. Now today the big news is that poz bottoms are now neg&#8230; At least in Switzerland&#8230; OK, not exactly, but&#8230; This one is big, so pay attention&#8230; [See the update at the end of this post&#8230;] The Swiss Federal [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rawtop.com\/sex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rawtop.com\/sex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rawtop.com\/sex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rawtop.com\/sex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rawtop.com\/sex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=151"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rawtop.com\/sex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rawtop.com\/sex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rawtop.com\/sex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rawtop.com\/sex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}