Asking here instead of searching, for conversational purposes:
In the 90s, some STD training I took said it was highly unlikely for otherwise healthy bio women to contract HIV from a man (ie compared to sex trafficked women in poor health), with the claim that vaginal sex is less susceptible to micro tearing that allows easy transmission than anal sex is.
I didn’t really question this at the time because it seemed plausible and I believed the people who were telling us this. (Note: this was in a medical context, not someone trying to scare us.) Is there any credibility to that idea now that we have more data, and hopefully leased biased science than we had in the 80s?
It's true that it's less likely, but calling it "unlikely" is grossly irresponsible. Yes, the chance is only 1-2%, but that's per vaginal sexual encounter. (And it's also "only" 20% for anal.)
That doesn't match what the top study says: 1.4% for anal and 0.08% for vaginal.
> The analysis, based on the results of four studies, estimated the risk through receptive anal sex (receiving the penis into the anus, also known as bottoming) to be 1.4%.
> It is estimated the risk of HIV transmission through receptive vaginal sex (receiving the penis in the vagina) to be 0.08% (equivalent to 1 transmission per 1,250 exposures).
In the fog of the day, you can understand why 1 transmission per 1,250 occurrences qualified as unlikely. Female prostitutes were self-reporting that they didn't use condoms and weren't showing symptoms. Meanwhile the disease decimated the gay male population which is why it was called GRID ("Gay-Related Immune Deficiency"). It was a complicated and horrible time and the data really wasn't there.
Yeah, agreed. That was the takeaway 3 decades ago, and I only bring it up no out of curiosity of how erroneous that turned out to be. I’d hope no one would describe it that way today.
In the 90s, some STD training I took said it was highly unlikely for otherwise healthy bio women to contract HIV from a man (ie compared to sex trafficked women in poor health), with the claim that vaginal sex is less susceptible to micro tearing that allows easy transmission than anal sex is.
I didn’t really question this at the time because it seemed plausible and I believed the people who were telling us this. (Note: this was in a medical context, not someone trying to scare us.) Is there any credibility to that idea now that we have more data, and hopefully leased biased science than we had in the 80s?