HIV Transmission Risk

Whenever i take a mini break from whining, bitching and moaning about med school, I like to throw in some edumacation for those who care to know. This post was prompted and sponsored (indirectly) by the ignorance spewed in the comments on this post. HIV positive woman tells lover "Welcome to my world" after they had sex.

You can thank me later and please people, let's refrain from having unnecessary heart attacks over my inability to let things go. Just roll your eyes, shake your head and pray the good lord touches me. No need to raise your blood pressure over this crazy girl. Auntie Mary, you hear?

HIV transmission risk brought to you by the CDC courtesy of Google-is-your-friend

This is broken down into risk per 10,000 exposures - meaning what is your risk of getting infected with HIV if you were exposed 10,000 times.

Source

So for example, if you were exposed 10,000 to HIV through blood transfusion, 9,000 of those times you would be infected, which means you have a 90% chance of being infected through blood transfusion. Pretty high.

Let's go over to sex - receptive penile-vaginal intercourse (the woman is exposed to an HIV positive man), for every 10,000 times you are exposed that way, 10 of those times you would be infected. That is 0.1%, the risk is even less if an HIV negative man has sex with an HIV positive woman (Insertive penile-vaginal intercourse). For some reason, mostly likely anatomical differences, it is more difficult for a woman to pass on the virus to a man. You can see the risk is higher for receptive anal intercourse (a negative male or female receiving anal sex from a positive male) but none of them are 100%. Which is why sometimes one partner is positive and the other partner turns out negative. There was an HIV positive patient (with full blown AIDS at the time of admission), with a less than 1 yr old baby and a fiancee who were both negative. Blew my mind. It happens.

This data is from the CDC and if you can't trust the CDC, then you need Jesus and more help than i can offer you. 

The point of this post is to once again reiterate that just because you slept with someone who is HIV positive without protection or you had unprotected sex does not AUTOMATICALLY give you the virus.
That does not mean you should go about playing Russian roulette as these are just odds and the odds might not always be in your favor. I'm just saying people should calm down, man or woman up and go get tested instead of dying slowly in fear because you don't know your status. At the end of the day, being infected with HIV is no longer a death sentence and it's better to know whether you have it or not than to find out when it has already progressed to AIDS. Also, people with very low viral loads are less likely to transmit the virus.

You are welcome.

Going back to the story that prompted this post, if this really happened, that man has 72 hours to go get post exposure prophylaxis and drastically reduce the odds of getting infected. People need to be aware of their options.