High Risk of Unprotected Sex Shown : Health: Tests find one in five semen samples from HIV-infected men contain the virus that causes AIDS. There is no way to predict when it will be present, researchers say.
More than one in every five semen samples from HIV-infected men contain live specimens of the virus that causes AIDS, demonstrating the high risk of unprotected sex, even with men showing no symptoms, researchers say.
Dr. Ann C. Collier of the University of Washington in Seattle said a study of more than 100 semen samples taken from 16 HIV-positive men over a two-year period found live and infectious virus 22% of the time.
Collier said Friday that the appearance of the virus, which causes AIDS, was intermittent, appearing in the semen from some men during one test, but absent when the same men were tested later.
“In one way, this is good news,” said Collier. “If the virus was found more frequently, then the transmission rate of the disease would be much higher.”
The bad news, she said, is that nobody can tell when the virus will be present in the semen of HIV-positive men.
“We could find no predictors of who would and who would not be shedding the virus [through their semen],” said Collier.
A report on the study is to be published in the September Journal of Urology, a peer-reviewed medical journal of the American Urological Assn. Researchers from New York University School of Medicine also participated in the study.
Collier said even taking anti-viral drugs does not assure virus-free semen. The rate of virus detection was the same in patients on AIDS drugs as in patients not taking medications.
Collier said the study should serve to warn some couples who have proposed that sperm from an HIV-positive partner be used for artificial insemination. She said this was thought possible because some studies have shown that the virus only rarely appears in sperm. But she said the new work shows that the virus is in semen almost a quarter of the time and that there is no way to predict when that will be.
Public health authorities recommend that all sexually active people practice safe sex by wearing condoms, but even this carries some risk. Only monogamy with an uninfected partner or abstinence assures no sexual transmission of HIV.
