HIV breakthrough - antiretorviral drugs make people with HIV strikingy less infectious

[nichomachus]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703730804576319043572865406.html">AIDS Study Marks Prevention Breakthrough

Treating AIDS patients with antiretroviral drugs makes them strikingly less infectious, researchers said Thursday, in a landmark finding that is likely to reinvigorate efforts to slow the pandemic.

The results were so overwhelming that an independent panel monitoring the research recommended the results be released four years before the large, multi-country study had been scheduled to end.

"This new finding convincingly demonstrates that treating the infected individual—and doing so sooner rather than later—can have a major impact on reducing HIV transmission," said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the U.S.'s National Institutes of Health, which funded the study.

Comparing the two rates of infection, patients taking antiretroviral drugs were 96.3% less likely to pass on the virus. That result was highly statistically significant.

No reason to give up safe sex, but an important finding anyway. Any time they stop a study early and put the control group on the drug, that's a breakthrough.

[thereismore]

1. retroviral drugs -> less viral load -> less chance of transmission. This is news? nt

[Avalux]

3. Always a theory but now it's been quantitated. n/t

[Avalux]

2. This is great news. I will need to read the study results but....

when a patient is effectively treated with antiretrovirals to where the viral load (amount of free floating virus in the bloodstream or semen) is very low or undetectable, it makes sense the patient would be less infectious.

Please remember though, antiretrovirals are not a cure.