HIV, blogging, me

"Rules" about HIV transmission have become mythical standards, repeated over and over. Reporter Rex Wockner has saved us all the time of finding and actually digging through the new POZ magazine (my local Multimags outlet doesn't carry it, though it's worth reading the whole thing for the lingo alone) by excerpting from its piece on HIV transmission.

Highlights: "And for straight people, if you're positive and you are the inserter in penile-vaginal sex, there's a 1 in 111,111 chance you'll infect your partner. If it's the woman who is positive, then the chance is one in a million she'll infect you.

"It almost makes you wonder how so many people became HIV-positive if the virus is so damned hard to transmit.

"One interesting tidbit I learned a couple of weeks ago at a California state AIDS meeting in Long Beach was that they now believe that a huge percentage of all HIV transmissions occur in the months right after the transmitter gets infected." That would be when you don't even know yet that you're infected. "Apparently that's when an individual has tons of virus to spread around. The risk of infecting someone apparently drops significantly thereafter -- even when you're not on treatment.

"One thing I appreciated about this POZ piece is that it acknowledged that taking HIV-positive semen into your mouth carries perhaps the same risk as being the inserter in anal sex with an HIV-positive partner."

The complete Wockner column is here. It's followed by a quick blurb on why blogging is stupid...? I'm the Eleanor mentioned -- and I still say that blogging's writing requirements are good. Unless I'm really darned busy..... like this week....