People on HIV medication cannot transmit the virus, declares CDC

Too many gay and bisexual men are not receiving treatment, warns US body

File photo: A reactor is added to a blood sample to test for HIV (REUTERS/Thomas Mukoya)

The Centre for Disease Control (CDC) has declared that HIV-positive people taking effective medication to suppress the virus cannot pass it on through sex, and that it will update its guidelines accordingly.

The landmark step by the US public health institute follows years of clinical trials showing that those using effective anti-retroviral therapy (ART) do not risk infecting their sexual partners.

Activists and researchers have long campaigned for the CDC to make the declaration, but they had declined to do so.

ART removes actively replicating HIV, yet the virus can remain hidden in the body, meaning a patient must take the drugs continuously.

In an open letter marking National Gay Men's HIV/AIDS Awareness Day, CDC directors Eugene McCray and Jonathan H Mermin said they hoped to reduce stigma that HIV-positive people face.

"Across three different studies, including thousands of couples and many thousand acts of sex without a condom or pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), no HIV transmissions to an HIV-negative partner were observed when the HIV-positive person was virally suppressed," they said.

"This means that people who take ART daily as prescribed and achieve and maintain an undetectable viral load have effectively no risk of sexually transmitting the virus to an HIV-negative partner."

But they continued by saying that too many gay and bisexual men with HIV were not receiving proper care they needed.

"Among gay and bisexual men living with diagnosed HIV, 61 per cent have achieved viral suppression, more than in previous years, but well short of where we want to be," they said.

"More work is needed to close this gap and to address the barriers that make it more difficult for some gay and bisexual men, including African American and Hispanic/Latino men, to get HIV care and treatment."

Both socioeconomic and cultural problems needed to be overcome so more people achieved viral suppression, they said, including low education and stigma around the disease.

The CDC joins a number of other organisations in announcing that those with an undetectable virus load have a zero per cent risk of sexual transmission.