China AIDS study raises flag over drugs-as-prevention hope

A Chinese study published on World AIDS Day says drugs used to curb HIV in infected people also help protect their uninfected partner, but far less effectively than other research has found.

The idea of using anti-retrovirals to prevent HIV as well as treat it leapt into the headlines last year when researchers reported stellar results from trials in Africa, Asia and the United States.

In a experiment, they recruited 1,763 so-called "serodiscordant" couples, meaning one partner had HIV and the other was uninfected.

If the HIV patient was given antiretroviral drugs, this reduced the risk -- by a massive 96 percent, equal to the effectiveness of a condom -- of transmitting the virus to the partner, the investigators found.

Acting on this breakthrough, the World Health Organisation (WHO) recommended that the infected partner in a "serodiscordant" couple be given anti-retrovirals regardless of their count of CD4 immune cells, a benchmark for initiating treatment.

The new study, published in The Lancet, looked back at how Chinese "serodiscordant" couples have fared.

The importance here is that the conditions are real life, and different from medical trials where for ethical reasons, couples are regularly advised about safe sex and their health and wellbeing are more closely monitored.

Researchers led by Yiming Shao, a professor at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Beijing, trawled through China's national HIV database.

They examined the state of more than 38,000 "serodiscordant" couples, who were followed for up to nine years, from 2003 to 2011.

Of this total, 24,000 of the couples were under treatment while 14,000 were not under treatment during the period they were studied.

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China AIDS study raises flag over drugs-as-prevention hope