It all started in April 1989, when at the Sandoval Health Center in Madrid, specialized in sexually transmitted diseases , doctor Jorge del Romero started a program whose objective was to follow up on serodiscordant couples (in which one is a carrier of HIV and HIV). not another).
The growing desire of these couples to be parents led to the launch of a protocol in April 2002 with the aim that they could be parents with all possible guarantees and taking into account all possible reproductive methods, including natural ones. The result of this work has been published in the journal Medicine , where it documents 144 pregnancies between 2002 and 2013 in 161 serodiscordant couples after more than 7,000 unprotected intercourse. The conclusion of this study is overwhelming: zero transmission between parents and newborns.
According to Del Romero, “we have not observed any case of HIV transmission in serodiscordant couples in which the infected person received antiretroviral treatment, despite having unprotected sex.”
This work confirms others carried out in different countries such as the one that is still in process, PARTNER, and that in 2014 made a partial presentation of the results after evaluating a total of 16,400 relationships between gay men and 28,000 heterosexual men: zero transmissions.
Now, the fact that there is no transmission does not imply that its probability is zero. For the previous results obtained by PARTNER, in the case of higher risk, anal sex with ejaculation , the chances of transmission are 4%.
Thanks to these and other studies, researchers from the Center for Disease Control, better known by its acronym in English CDC, have reevaluated the risks of HIV infection: if the use of condoms reduces the risk of infection is 80% (between other causes, because it can break), with antiretroviral therapy it is higher, 92%. Combining both methods the risk is reduced by 99%.
