Important note: Information in this article was accurate in August 1999. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.AIDSWEEKLY Plus; Monday, August 9, 1999
Daniel J. DeNoon, Senior Editor
CW HENDERSON PUBLISHER -- One episode of unprotected receptive anal sex (URA) has a 0.82 percent risk of transmitting HIV, a new study shows.
But don't count on these odds: nine of the 60 study participants who contracted HIV did so after only one or two episodes of URA.
And don't count on being safe by avoiding only highest-risk sex: only 15 percent of the seroconverters acquired HIV via URA.
"As lower-risk practices become more common, they may play a larger role in propagating the epidemic and should also be addressed by interventions targeting high-risk homosexual and bisexual men," wrote Eric Vittinghoff and colleagues of the University of California, San Francisco.
Vittinghoff et al. reported their findings in the American Journal of Epidemiology ("Per-Contact Risk of Human Immunodeficiency Virus Transmission between Male Sexual Partners," Am J Epidemiol, 1999;150:306-11).
The researchers evaluated the per-contact risk of acquiring HIV during male/male sex via specific sex acts. They employed data from a prospective cohort study of 2,189 high-risk, HIV seronegative homosexual and bisexual men enrolled 1992-1994. Sixty of the men acquired HIV infection during follow-up.
Per-contact risk of HIV transmission was:
"There was heterogeneity in per-contact risk, with nine seroconversions occurring after only one or two episodes of URA," Vittinghoff et al. noted.
The corresponding author for this study is Eric Vittinghoff, Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, University of California, San Francisco, 74 New Montgomery, Suite 600, San Francisco, CA 94105.
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