As a volunteer for a gay men’s organisation I am sometimes involved in HIV prevention work in gay venues in central London. The organisation I work for develops posters, adverts and booklets to promote HIV prevention messages targeting a specific audience.
Recently, I was helping pre-testing our latest booklet to which I had also contributed. Therefore I knew what the booklet was about, which is usually not the case since editorial and testing teams are different. Over a period of two hours I interviewed ten people who agreed, some after a …

In a recent posting I suggested that the possibility to show your HIV status online proves “how much has been accomplished in stamping out stigma”. A reader objected that “Actually, no. This is a move to culturally pressured disclosure so that people with HIV can be further minoritized and excluded, and presumed HIV-negative people can couple with potentially dangerous self-satisfaction.”
A search on the Fridae.com website which allows for publicly showing one’s HIV status returns 280 profiles (110 of them Caucasian) stating being HIV negative at the last test (a period …

HAART for HIV Prevention, an Overview
(reproduced with permission)

Despite the interesting results of an HIV vaccine trial in Thailand (RV144), HIV prevention is still limited to a small number of options many of which are not bullet-proof. Biomedical interventions based on vaccines and microbicides are still a long shot away. Conversely, treatment is working well in bringing HIV-infected people back to a normal life and potentially reducing the risk of HIV transmission by reducing their viral load. The use of antiretroviral drugs as a means …

OPINION. One objection against the use of ARV treatment for HIV prevention is that it puts people on treatment whilst they may clinically not need it. My first reaction to that is to ask when is it clinically relevant to treat an HIV infected person? So far the various guidelines produced are clear and based on the CD4 count. But the guidelines have changed during the years and the goalpost has been moved from below 200 to below 350 and soon to below 500 and is reaching the mean Cd4 …

HIV acquisition and HIV transmission through sexual intercourse are two very different things. The former relates to an HIV negative individual being infected by an HIV positive person whilst the later is about an HIV positive individual infecting an HIV negative person.
That may seems obvious or hair splitting, but when it comes to ending the spread of HIV in the population, it is very important to understand the difference between HIV acquisition and HIV transmission.
HIV acquisition can be regarded as a dynamic and active process in the person exposed to …