New HIV guidelines changing lives
Last year, Chris Kimmenez and his wife asked their doctors a simple question. Could Chris, who has been HIV positive since 1989 but keeps the virus in check through medication, transmit it sexually to Paula?
They were pretty sure they knew the answer. Married for more than 30 years, they had not always practiced safe sex, but Paula showed no signs of having the virus.
Their physicians were less certain. "They had a conversation, and they did some research on it," Kimmenez said. "They came back to us and said there may still be a risk, but we're comfortable enough" that unprotected sex is safe.
"We knew that all along," said Kimmenez, 56, who works with ex-offenders in Philadelphia.
Simple acknowledgments like that one, spoken quietly in the privacy of doctors' offices, mark the arrival of a historic moment in the history of HIV: Medical authorities are publicly agreeing that people with undetectable viral loads cannot transmit the virus that causes AIDS.
The policy change has profound implications for the way people view HIV. The change promises not just unprotected sex for couples like Kimmenez and his wife, but also reduced stigma for the 1.2 million Americans liv- ing with HIV. The policy change also offers the hope that more people will be tested and begin treatment if they are found to have the virus rather than live in denial.
"There was something in me that said I'm damaged and I made a mistake, and people see it and I'm a danger," said Mark King, 56, a writer and activist who tested positive for HIV in 1985. But now, treatment has fully suppressed the virus. "When I finally internalized this message . . . something suddenly lifted off of me that is hard to describe. It was almost as if someone wiped me clean. I no longer feel like this diseased pariah."
Once considered a death sentence, HIV infection can now be managed via medication, much like chronic diseases such as diabetes, and people with the virus live full lives.
The rate of new infections in the United States dropped by 10 percent from 2010 to 37,600 in 2014, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Fewer than 7,000 people died of HIV/AIDS that year.