HIV and ID Observations

May 5th, 2019

Latest Published Study on HIV Treatment as Prevention Is Déjà Vu All Over Again, But Some News Is So Good It Never Gets Old

Even if you’re not an ID or HIV specialist, there’s an excellent chance you’ve heard of the PARTNER2 study, just published in The Lancet. If not, the title could not be more descriptive: Risk of HIV transmission through condomless sex in serodifferent gay couples with the HIV-positive partner taking suppressive antiretroviral therapy And, in case you’ve just […]

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January 1st, 2017

Top Stories in HIV Medicine for 2016

A lot of these “Best of …” or “Top Stories in …” lists have already been published, as they seem to be appearing earlier and earlier each year. Pretty soon we’ll start reading them around the same time they sell Halloween Candy — and that’s just too early, sorry. Now this list, however, appears just as 2016 is in […]

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October 30th, 2013

HIV Treatment of Serodiscordant Couples: The Home Run, Slam Dunk, and Open Goal in Clinical Research

Just in time for Game 6 of the World Series, my colleague Rochelle Walensky has published a paper in theNew England Journal of Medicine (covered here in NEJM Journal Watch). evaluating the cost-effectiveness of treating HIV-infected individuals in serodiscordant couples. The results: In South Africa, early ART was cost-saving over a 5-year period. In both South Africa and India, early […]

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April 23rd, 2012

An Answer to a Commonly Asked Question: Is Treatment 100% Effective in Preventing HIV Transmission?

The excitement about “treatment as prevention”, and the results of Study 052, have led to many patients asking the question (if not in these words, than using others with a less medical slant), “So if I’m on treatment and doing well, just what is the risk of my transmitting HIV to others?” It’s not a question […]

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December 24th, 2011

Making a List and Checking it Twice, Then Making Sure 052 is On It

How big a news story was HPTN 052, which demonstrated that HIV treatment reduced transmission by at least 96%? (I like to emphasize that “at least” bit, since it’s likely that none of the study subjects with undetectable HIV RNA levels transmitted to their partners — the one case that did transmit did so before virologic suppression.) […]

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May 12th, 2011

HPTN 052 Results — Another Win for Early HIV Therapy

The results of the HPTN Study 052 — which randomized 1,763 serodiscordant couples to early vs delayed ART to evaluate whether this reduced the risk of HIV transmission — have just been released: Findings from the study were reviewed by an independent Data and Safety Monitoring Board (DSMB) …The DSMB concluded that initiation of ART by HIV-infected […]

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May 27th, 2010

HIV Treatment is Prevention!

The Lancet has just published a large prospective study demonstrating the protective effect of HIV treatment on the risk of viral transmission: 3381 couples were eligible for analysis … Only one of 103 genetically-linked HIV-1 transmissions was from an infected participant who had started ART, corresponding to transmission rates of 0·37 (95% CI 0·09—2·04) per 100 person-years […]

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