An extensive long-term study has confirmed that antiretroviral therapy completely suppresses HIV transmission. This is reported by The Guardian with reference to a scientific work published in The Lancet.
The study involved about a thousand homosexual couples, where only one of the partners was HIV-positive and took antiretroviral drugs. For eight years of observation, not a single case of transmission of the virus between the participants in the experiment was recorded. 15 men became infected as a result of unprotected sex with people who were not on antiretroviral therapy.
“The results of our study provide conclusive evidence that gay men are at zero risk of HIV transmission with antiretroviral therapy,” said Professor Alison Rodgers of University College London, who led the experiment. The efficacy of antiretroviral therapy for heterosexual couples has been previously confirmed.
In 2017, there were about 40 million people living with HIV worldwide. 21.7 million of them were on antiretroviral therapy.
In April, it was reported that at the end of 2018 the number of Russians diagnosed with HIV exceeded a million people. The researchers recognized the regions most affected by the virus in Kemerovo, Irkutsk, Sverdlovsk, Samara and Orenburg regions.
HIV infection is a slowly progressive disease caused by the human immunodeficiency virus. It affects the cells of the immune system, as a result of which its work is inhibited, and later AIDS develops.
