Swiss recommendations now state that HIV positives on effective anti-retroviral treatment not infectious

This post is coming a little late to the fore. Nevertheless, I still wanted to mention it briefly.

Swiss public health officials have issued new guidelines (original in French and German [pdf warning]) regarding the infectiousness of HIV+ individuals on effective anti-retroviral therapy. Basically, the new guidelines state that condoms are unnecessary in serodiscordant (one positive, the other not) couples under a narrow but widely applicable set of circumstances. These circumstances are:

• The HIV+ individual must consistently adhere to the anti-retroviral therapy regimen and the effectiveness of the therapy must be monitored at regular intervals by his or her treating physician according to officially accepted guidelines;
• The viral load must be below the limit of detection (<40>)
• The HIV+ person must not be suffering from any other sexually transmitted infections.

Again, under these very narrow circumstances, serodiscordant couples needn't use condoms during sexual intercourse. Read the English translation here [pdf warning].

This is in accord with a study presented at the Fifteenth Conference on Retroviral and Opportunistic Infections. That study concluded that provision of ARV therapy to African nations could reduce HIV infection over all by 90%.

[This post was picked up by Reuters through Blogburst.]