HIV drugs sharply cut risk of transmission, study finds

AIDS researchers announced Thursday that a study conducted in nine countries has proved the long-standing hunch that HIV-infected people on treatment are much less likely to transmit the virus than people who aren’t taking the drugs.

The study, which was stopped early because the results were so dramatic, found that men and women whose sexual partners were infected with the AIDS virus were almost completely protected if the partner took a combination of HIV-suppressing drugs.

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A study claims treating HIV patients early on can dramatically lower the chances they'll transmit the virus to their sexual partners. (May 12)

The study provides evidence — useful in American cities and African villages — that getting HIV-infected people on treatment early, long before they have symptoms, may be the best strategy for slowing the 30-year-old epidemic. The District has the highest infection rate of any American city, on a par with that of Rwanda.

“This is far beyond expectation. It could completely change the way we are dealing with the epidemic,” said Michel Sidibe, head of UNAIDS, the United Nations’ AIDS program.

“This is data that you can’t ignore,” said Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which paid for the $78 million experiment.

Condoms, behavior change, clean hypodermic needles and a safe blood supply are the chief tools for preventing HIV infection. However, since the arrival of antiretroviral therapy (ART) in 1996, there has been a lot of indirect evidence that treatment is a tool for prevention.

The reason is simple. ART, three or more drugs taken every day, prevents the AIDS virus from replicating, and it rapidly disappears from blood and other bodily fluids that are the usual vehicles for infection.

The idea that treatment could be preventive was seen in studies of “discordant” couples — one partner infected, the other not — in Kenya. Researchers observed that when an infected person was in treatment, the partner was at much less risk of becoming infected. This observation held for whole populations.

Researchers in British Columbia last year reported that the rate of new infection for the entire province declined after a policy of widespread HIV testing and early treatment was adopted.

What was missing was evidence from a randomized, controlled trial — the gold standard of medical research — that treatment had a clearly preventive effect.

The new study enrolled 1,763 couples in five African countries, as well as Brazil, India, Thailand and the United States. Nearly all were heterosexual. The researchers wanted to include large numbers of gay men but were unsuccessful in recruiting them, possibly because they were already convinced that treatment reduces transmission.

All of the volunteers had a CD4 cell count of 350 to 550 cells per cubic millimeter of blood — evidence of mild damage to the immune system.

In half of the couples, the infected person immediately went on ART. In the other half, the medicines weren’t started until the infection became more severe, as evidenced by a fall of the CD4 count below 250. All were advised to use condoms.

Over the next four years, 28 people acquired HIV from their partner. (Gene fingerprinting of the virus revealed that in 11 other cases, people became infected by someone other than their regular partner.) Of those 28 new infections, 27 occurred among couples in which the HIV-infected partner had not started taking antiretroviral drugs at the start of the study. That amounted to a 96 percent reduction in the risk of acquiring HIV in the couples in which the infected partner was on ART.