HIV Treatment Bulletin, 12 July 2016
The PARTNER study showing the impact of HIV treatment (ART) on reducing transmission will benefit millions of people globally.
The results set a new challenge about whether transmission is anything other than a theoretical risk when someone is taking effective ART. This reverses the common assumption that, by definition, some level of risk always exists when one partner is HIV positive.
The PARTNER study provides good evidence that undetectable viral load might be a threshold below which sexual HIV transmission does not occur. The importance of the PARTNER study is that it included both gay and straight couples, that it measured risk in people who were not using condoms and that it estimated absolute risks.