HIV neg dating HIV pos

[cloud999]

I do HIV testing for a living...meaning I'm a professional. And have old friends who do HIV research in academia (working on a vaccine).

Statistically, you have a very low chance of contracting HIV from a positive person from a single encounter. However, the regular contact one maintains in a LTR compounds that risk, so that the odds of you contracting HIV reach 1, with time. I'm paranoid enough seeing all the death and dying I do in the hospital, I don't need to be thinking about the odds of contracting HIV from different practices with my long-term lover. That's a recipe for anxiety disorders.

For this reason, I recommend that HIV Positive people date only other HIV Positive people. If HIV couldn't spread, it wouldn't be the fastest-growing pandemic my generation has witnessed. On the (not so) bright side, HIV Positive people now have millions of other HIV Positive people to potentially date.

At work, I've handled blood specimens that contained very high titers of HIV virus. It's a humbling experience, to hold a microscopic death sentence in your hand...the virus responsible for so much global pain and suffering.

[LateBloomer]

So far, two different opinions from Story and cloud999.

Story seems to suggest low probability.

But Cloud suggests a higher probability.

I appreciate all feedback.

[Genersis]

I though it could also be transmitted if someone with HIV's saliva enters someone else's blood stream?:confused:

I'm sorry, i'm not too well read in this area.
I guess i kind of thought just about any bodily fluid from someone who is infected can carry the virus.:redface:

[dfiant]

60 minutes Australia is about to present a story of people living with HIV, hopefully this thunder storm will stay away long enough to nit wipe out our power.

[dfiant]

Amazing. The new 'high risk' group is heterosexual women. There was one woman that has lived with HIV for 16 years, 11 years past what doctors expected her to live. She has concieved 2 children naturally and her partner didn't contract the virus, but was exposed. Her 13 year old Daughter and 8 year old son are both also virus free.

This woman was a picture of health, an elite tri-athalete and 41 years old.

The real risk of HIV now is complacency. We see people with HIV living apparent healthy lives with years...DECADES added to their lives through arduous drug therapy that have the potential to be toxic, and now we start to think 'HIV isn't so bad, you can live with it', and there lies the problem which is now seeing and increase of infections.

http://sixtyminutes.ninemsn.com.au/artic...id=8366724

[cloud999]

Indeed, dfiant. It's the seatbelt effect...people drive more dangerously with seat-belts, because they feel safer in the event of a crash. The last newly HIV-pos patient I tested was like your show's mother, only in her late thirties.

One of my least-favorite virology professors, who developed two different HIV medications in the late 90's, adamantly repeated in his lectures "HIV is a preventable disease. If the human race strictly adhered to safe sex and quarantine practices, this pandemic would be over in two decades. Unfortunately, we are a primitive species." He's now one of the lead HIV vaccine team leaders at my alma mater, studying why some very rare Europeans are genetically immune to HIV infection.

I don't think he likes people in general, tbh.

[Story]

Cloud is clearly expressing his own fears and biases when he talks about infection rate. Hes using the statistical theory that you have 10000 marbles in a bag, each time you have sex with an hiv poz person equates one chance you will draw a marble randomly and grab the "infected" one. Under the circumstances your hiv positive partner is undetectable and you always try to practice safe so we could equate that the number of infected numbers is few, for this example we will use 2. So what cloud is trying to say is that you have a 2 in 10,000 chance of grabbing an infected marble but after each "pick" you dont put the marble back in so now your chance to draw starts becoming something like 2 in 9999 then 2 in 9998 etc. The flaw with this thinking is that if you have had sex with your hiv positive partner 50 times, your chances of infection do not randomly go up, (please explain to me how suddenly my chance to infect you go up if nothing has changed. neither are you picking multiple marbles out of the bag at once, each time you are simply grabbing 1 of 10,000, two of those are infected and whatever marble you picked you put back in the bag so your chances will always remain 2 in 10,000. So basically while you have more opportunities to get infected your chance of getting infected each time is low.

While im not here to bash anyones argument I have a strong feeling that clouds argument is biased because (surprisingly) the healthcare fields culture he works in has a bias against this particular disease, despite knowing what they do, there are still misconceptions within the healthcare culture and its saddening to see friends of mine who are hiv positive who cannot reveal their status to anyone at their work for fear of prejudice.

As far as when it comes to dating hiv positive people if you are negative, that is a call only you can make, to a certain degree you would have to be willing to accept the fact that you might at some point become infected, but if this is the "Right" guy are you willing to take that chance? I want to reiterate while the chance of infection is low if the poz partner is on their meds and you are practicing safe sex there will always be a chance, however low and that must be acknowledged. Keep in mind though also that this chance should only come into effect if unsafe sex practices might occur say if youre both drunk etc or something like that, im highly skeptical of anyone getting infected off of safe sex.

Lastly, while we do want to stop the spread of HIV infection, saying HIV positive people should only date other HIV positive people to stop infection is rather silly. Most infections occur from people who are very active sexually and have multiple sexual partners. This person doesnt know they infected the virus and neither checks for years their status until they get really sick, this person has now infected many others. The other main offender here are the people who know they are hiv positive but dont care to tell their sexual partners thus passing it on, they are so selfish they simply dont care if they pass it on or not, they just need to get their nuts off now. Until you can find ways to stop these two types of people i wouldnt say anything about people who are open about their status with potential partners. People who are know and are open about it are more likely to try to be safe all the time than those who arent open and will not generally infect other people...



Ok thats all for now, but I am a bit versed on this subject so let me know if you have any other questions.

[LateBloomer]

Cloud is clearly expressing his own fears and biases when he talks about infection rate. Hes using the statistical theory that you have 10000 marbles in a bag, each time you have sex with an hiv poz person equates one chance you will draw a marble randomly and grab the "infected" one. Under the circumstances your hiv positive partner is undetectable and you always try to practice safe so we could equate that the number of infected numbers is few, for this example we will use 2. So what cloud is trying to say is that you have a 2 in 10,000 chance of grabbing an infected marble but after each "pick" you dont put the marble back in so now your chance to draw starts becoming something like 2 in 9999 then 2 in 9998 etc. The flaw with this thinking is that if you have had sex with your hiv positive partner 50 times, your chances of infection do not randomly go up, (please explain to me how suddenly my chance to infect you go up if nothing has changed. neither are you picking multiple marbles out of the bag at once, each time you are simply grabbing 1 of 10,000, two of those are infected and whatever marble you picked you put back in the bag so your chances will always remain 2 in 10,000. So basically while you have more opportunities to get infected your chance of getting infected each time is low.

While im not here to bash anyones argument I have a strong feeling that clouds argument is biased because (surprisingly) the healthcare fields culture he works in has a bias against this particular disease, despite knowing what they do, there are still misconceptions within the healthcare culture and its saddening to see friends of mine who are hiv positive who cannot reveal their status to anyone at their work for fear of prejudice.

As far as when it comes to dating hiv positive people if you are negative, that is a call only you can make, to a certain degree you would have to be willing to accept the fact that you might at some point become infected, but if this is the "Right" guy are you willing to take that chance? I want to reiterate while the chance of infection is low if the poz partner is on their meds and you are practicing safe sex there will always be a chance, however low and that must be acknowledged. Keep in mind though also that this chance should only come into effect if unsafe sex practices might occur say if youre both drunk etc or something like that, im highly skeptical of anyone getting infected off of safe sex.

Lastly, while we do want to stop the spread of HIV infection, saying HIV positive people should only date other HIV positive people to stop infection is rather silly. Most infections occur from people who are very active sexually and have multiple sexual partners. This person doesnt know they infected the virus and neither checks for years their status until they get really sick, this person has now infected many others. The other main offender here are the people who know they are hiv positive but dont care to tell their sexual partners thus passing it on, they are so selfish they simply dont care if they pass it on or not, they just need to get their nuts off now. Until you can find ways to stop these two types of people i wouldnt say anything about people who are open about their status with potential partners. People who are know and are open about it are more likely to try to be safe all the time than those who arent open and will not generally infect other people...



Ok thats all for now, but I am a bit versed on this subject so let me know if you have any other questions.

Thanks man, I understand your point about the statistics and probability, but I guess the idea that's kinda nagging on my mind is the fact that I've personally experienced two broken condoms in my relatively short sexual life. Remember I've only been at this since age 35 and I had a four year "dry spell" too.

Said differently, in just four years of an active sexual life I've had two condoms break.

So yeah, we should all practice safe sex, but..."there but for the grace of God go I."

The discussion so far has been helpful to me, however. Basically what's starting to crystallize is the idea that if I'm not in love I should probably keep looking for a different partner.

The only thing that bugs me about that idea is the feeling that I could be passing up something really good. I feel like I wanna explore this because I'm so dissatisfied with what I'm finding elsewhere....

But isn't this the typical human condition?

[cloud999]

Cloud is clearly expressing his own fears and biases when he talks about infection rate. Hes using the statistical theory that you have 10000 marbles in a bag, each time you have sex with an hiv poz person equates one chance you will draw a marble randomly and grab the "infected" one. Under the circumstances your hiv positive partner is undetectable and you always try to practice safe so we could equate that the number of infected numbers is few, for this example we will use 2. So what cloud is trying to say is that you have a 2 in 10,000 chance of grabbing an infected marble but after each "pick" you dont put the marble back in so now your chance to draw starts becoming something like 2 in 9999 then 2 in 9998 etc. The flaw with this thinking is that if you have had sex with your hiv positive partner 50 times, your chances of infection do not randomly go up, (please explain to me how suddenly my chance to infect you go up if nothing has changed. neither are you picking multiple marbles out of the bag at once, each time you are simply grabbing 1 of 10,000, two of those are infected and whatever marble you picked you put back in the bag so your chances will always remain 2 in 10,000. So basically while you have more opportunities to get infected your chance of getting infected each time is low.

No, that's not what I'm saying.

What I'm talking about is the law of very big numbers. A one-in-a-million chance becomes almost certain to occur if you try one trillion times. This is how we induce extremely rare mutations in bacterial species, for example.

Or, in the case of HIV, a one-in-a-thousand chance of infection matters when you have sex once a day with a known HIV positive person for several years.

At work, I deal with hundreds of blood, urine, and semen specimens every day. While the vast, vast majority of those specimens don't contain infectious disease, should I take off my protective gear because the odds of being infected by any one specimen is so low?

While im not here to bash anyones argument I have a strong feeling that clouds argument is biased because (surprisingly) the healthcare fields culture he works in has a bias against this particular disease, despite knowing what they do, there are still misconceptions within the healthcare culture and its saddening to see friends of mine who are hiv positive who cannot reveal their status to anyone at their work for fear of prejudice.

How did your friends contract HIV if it is statistically impossible to catch?

As far as when it comes to dating hiv positive people if you are negative, that is a call only you can make, to a certain degree you would have to be willing to accept the fact that you might at some point become infected, but if this is the "Right" guy are you willing to take that chance? I want to reiterate while the chance of infection is low if the poz partner is on their meds and you are practicing safe sex there will always be a chance, however low and that must be acknowledged. Keep in mind though also that this chance should only come into effect if unsafe sex practices might occur say if youre both drunk etc or something like that, im highly skeptical of anyone getting infected off of safe sex.

Condoms break, people become intoxicated, horniness often overpowers reason in the moment. I've been called by friends at 3AM desperately looking for a pharmacy to purchase Plan B because the condom broke and she's ovulating.

The odds of contracting HIV from a positive partner during unprotected sex is still relatively low (<3%)...it's repeated contact that will ensure your infection.

Lastly, while we do want to stop the spread of HIV infection, saying HIV positive people should only date other HIV positive people to stop infection is rather silly. Most infections occur from people who are very active sexually and have multiple sexual partners. This person doesnt know they infected the virus and neither checks for years their status until they get really sick, this person has now infected many others. The other main offender here are the people who know they are hiv positive but dont care to tell their sexual partners thus passing it on, they are so selfish they simply dont care if they pass it on or not, they just need to get their nuts off now. Until you can find ways to stop these two types of people i wouldnt say anything about people who are open about their status with potential partners. People who are know and are open about it are more likely to try to be safe all the time than those who arent open and will not generally infect other people...

Rather silly? Because certain dangerous fools are busy infecting the neighborhood with HIV, that means responsible individuals ought to go crazy too?

An HIV positive person who wishes to be safe all the time will seek out other HIV positive people for partners. There are a dozen dating sites dedicated to this ever-growing group of people.

If I were HIV positive, I would *not* want to sleep with an HIV negative individual I truly loved.

[LateBloomer]

I though it could also be transmitted if someone with HIV's saliva enters someone else's blood stream?:confused:

I'm sorry, i'm not too well read in this area.
I guess i kind of thought just about any bodily fluid from someone who is infected can carry the virus.:redface:

I'm no expert but I don't believe this is true.

The concern is semen and blood mixing with your blood as Story explained above.