When asked, “With regard to HIV-positive individuals transmitting HIV through sexual contact, how accurate do you believe the slogan Undetectable = Untransmittable is?” 55% of the men overall answered that the statement was “completely accurate” or “somewhat accurate.”Įighty-four percent of the men who reported they were living with HIV correctly identified that the U=U message was accurate, as did 54% of the men who reported they were HIV negative and 39% of the men who said they did not know their HIV status. Seventy-nine percent identified as gay, 18% as bisexual and 3% as queer. The median age was 32 years old, and the men ranged in age between 13 and 88 years old. Fourteen percent were Black, and 24% were Latino.
Respondents to the survey came from all U.S. It was published in the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes. Seeking to assess how well MSM comprehend that having undetectable HIV does indeed make it so an individual cannot transmit the virus to others through sex, Jonathon Rendina, PhD, MPH, of Hunter College of the City of University of New York, led a research team that engaged nearly 112,000 MSM in the United States in an online survey.Ĭonducted between November 2017 and September 2018, the study was supported by the NIAID, which is a division of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). “This public health message has the power to reduce stigma, protect the health of people living with HIV and prevent sexual transmission of HIV to others.”Īnthony Fauci, head of NIAID, at the 2019 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Seattle Benjamin Ryan Fauci, MD, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), said in a press release.
“The increased understanding and acceptance of U=U is encouraging because HIV treatment as prevention is a foundation of efforts to end the epidemic in the United States and around the world,” Anthony S. In 2016, the Prevention Access Campaign, a nonprofit advocacy group, launched with a mission to educate the public that, as its slogan states, “Undetectable = Untransmittable,” or “U=U,” for short. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently affirmed these findings, stating that successfully treating HIV is an estimated 100% effective at preventing sexual transmission of the virus.
#RISK GAY DEFINITION SERIES#
In a sign of significant progress in the effort to destigmatize HIV, a new survey of a large group of men who have sex with men (MSM) has found an increasing level of understanding in this demographic that people with the virus who have an undetectable viral load cannot transmit the virus through sex.ĭuring the current decade, a series of landmark studies has produced a massive trove of data that has led the scientific community to conclude that if people with HIV are on antiretroviral (ARV) treatment and sustain a fully suppressed viral load, they pose no risk of transmission to their sexual partners.