Many youths don’t tell partners about HIV

Study urges communication to stop infection

Nearly one in four youths living with HIV in the U.S. doesn’t notify sex or drug-use partners about potential exposure — despite medical professionals and others urging them to do so, a study of teens and young adults suggests.

This high-risk population continues to contract HIV at alarming rates, so identifying individuals unaware of their infection is imperative to prevent further transmission, the study team writes in the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.

A surprising finding from this survey-based study was that 81.7 percent of participants reported not having been contacted by a partner about their own potential exposure to HIV, said lead author Jacob J. van den Berg of the Brown University School of Public Health in Providence, Rhode Island.

It’s possible that their partners had no contact information for them, or that attempts to contact them were unsuccessful. It is also conceivable that they were tested before their partners became aware of their own infection, the study authors point out.

Still, “this number is incredibly high considering that at least one person should have contacted them regarding their own potential exposure according to current Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines,” van den Berg told Reuters Health in an email.

For the study, the researchers recruited 924 mostly male participants between 13 and 24 from 14 adolescent medicine clinics. All the participants had been “behaviorally infected,” for example, through sex or drug use.

Overall, more than three quarters of the participants reported that, once they learned they were HIV positive, they contacted all or at least some of their past sex or drug-use partners to notify them they may have been exposed to HIV. Another 22.4 percent of participants did not succeed or didn’t try to contact former partners.

The study team found that youths who had themselves been contacted about potentially being exposed to HIV were more likely to engage in partner notification.

They also found that survey participants were more likely to notify past partners if more than one person had talked to them about notification. That result is the “biggest takeaway” from the study, said Adam Cohen, director of advocacy and policy research at the AIDS Healthcare Foundation in Los Angeles.

Cohen, who wasn’t involved in the study, also highlighted the finding that more than 80 percent of survey participants were not themselves notified of potential HIV exposure. “There is a serious discrepancy between discussing partner notification and engaging in partner notification,” he said by email.

The authors acknowledge that limitations of the study include the fact that participants were already in care, so they might be more likely than youths outside the medical system to notify their partners. Because the data on notification was self-reported, though, it’s also possible that participants exaggerated how often they notified partners.