Doctors Report Female-To-Female HIV Transmission

[zakur]

Doctors Report Female-To-Female HIV Transmission (http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=571&ncid=751&e=4&u=/nm/20030211/hl_nm/female_hiv_dc)

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Based on genetic analysis, two US researchers report a case of HIV (news - web sites) infection that resulted from sexual contact between two females.

"I think that we touched the tip of an iceberg, in the sense that the general thought is that this doesn't happen at all," said Dr. Helena A. Kwakwa of the Jonathan Lax Treatment Center, an AIDS (news - web sites) clinic in Philadelphia. "But I still think that although this is an uncommon event it's something that we should all be aware of."

In the current issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases, Kwakwa and her colleague Dr. M. W. Ghobrial report the recent case of a 20-year-old woman who became infected with HIV.

The patient indicated she had had sexual relations exclusively with an HIV infected woman for the prior two years, and that she had been aware of her partner's infection status.

Sexual relations with her partner involved oral contact and the sharing of sex toys. The patient said that although she and her partner had never had sex during menstruation, on occasion a small amount of bleeding occurred during sex. The infected partner was openly bisexual, and reported using condoms whenever engaging in heterosexual sex.

[garys_2k]

This isn't surprising at all. Given that HIV is present in sexual secretions what's the big deal?

[Goshawk]

The big deal is that it's female-to-female transmission, which formerly was thought, if not to be impossible, at least extremely unlikely.

And also, there's this aspect of it, which Yahoo is tiptoeing around:
...on occasion a small amount of bleeding occurred during sex...The authors suggested that infection probably resulted from the drawing of blood in conjunction with the shared use of sex toys. In other words...

http://www.gay.com/news/article.html?2003/02/04/3
An HIV-positive bisexual woman may have infected her partner by using sex toys so vigorously that she bled during intercourse... Which made us all go " :eek: ".

So that's the big deal.

[Cecil]

Originally posted by Goshawk
The big deal is that it's female-to-female transmission, which formerly was thought, if not to be impossible, at least extremely unlikely. In other news, someone won the lottery yesterday against huge odds. She formerly believed this to be extremely unlikely, but is now convinced that anyone can win the lottery if they want to.

[neutrino_cannon]

If I were a lesbian/bisexual female, I might still use protection anyway.


Lottery protection, it's a novelty, it's safe sex, it's a good idea.

Plus, it didn't have to be HIV, it could have been any of the battery of STI's. And wouldn't veneral diseases evolve for ever more proclivity to spread?

[Ove]

To the best of my knowledge HIV can be transmittet through "bodily fluids", easiest through blood but also through other fluids. The virus is very fragile and soes not last long outside the body but this way of infection (vagina to mouth) has been known so there's nothing new in this story OTHER THAN IT HAS HAPPENED.

Tragic? ...... Yes :(
Surprising... No.

[BillyJoe]

Originally posted by Cecil
In other news, someone won the lottery yesterday against huge odds. She formerly believed this to be extremely unlikely, but is now convinced that anyone can win the lottery if they want to. Ah, you stole my line Cecil.
I was thinking the exact same thing when I read that post including the lottery analogy.
(BTW, did you see that lottery thread a few months back)

[BobM]

I've got news for those doctors... women bleed "down there" quite regularly _without_ the vigorous use of shared sex toys.

[xouper]

bump