How to Have Anal Sex

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Let’s Talk About Sex with Garza & Dulce is a safer sex video series that provides information and tips on how to minimize your risks of acquiring HIV and sexually transmitted infections in a variety of situations. Watch our resident sexperts Garza and Dulce de Leche as they address viewer questions about sex in a candid and fun format. Make sure to leave a comment below!

Let’s Talk About Sex with Garza & Dulce is sponsored by the HIV Research Section, SFDPH.  Read more about our HIV vaccine studies and UNITY study.

The “HIV cure” – A cure for one, not for all.

“Doctors Claim HIV-Positive Man Cured by Stem Cell Transplant” – Fox News: December 14, 2010

“Stem Cell Transplant cures HIV in ‘Berlin Patient’”- Huffington Post:  December 14, 2010

“Evidence for the cure of HIV infection”- Blood: March 10, 2011

Beginning in 2009, rumors suggesting the discovery of a miraculous “cure for HIV” made their way to major news publications and scientific journals throughout the world. The exciting news revolves around Timothy Ray Brown, a forty year old resident of Berlin infected with both HIV and leukemia. Dubbed the “Berlin patient,” Brown received a stem cell transplant in 2007 to treat his leukemia. The cells he received lacked a key piece that HIV needs to infect cells- a molecule called CCR5. The result was astounding: follow up tests could not detect any active HIV in his blood. Over three years later, they still can’t! Finally, after 30 long years the world has found a cure for the treacherous HIV virus that has killed over 25 million people! Right?

Well…not quite. Before calling the Berlin patient’s treatment a cure for HIV, it is important to know that there are two different ways to use the word cure:

1. Cure (as a verb): To relieve one of the symptoms of a disease or condition
2. Cure (as a noun): A complete or permanent solution or remedy

These two definitions actually make a difference in understanding what we can say about the Berlin patient. Using the verb form, we can say that the Berlin patient was “cured” of HIV because eliminating of the virus from his body relieved him of the infection. However, I don’t believe we can use the noun form to call stem cell treatment a “cure” for HIV because it is not a permanent solution to the HIV epidemic.

Firstly, the stem cell transplant Timothy Brown received is not simple and in fact, it can be deadly. The procedure involved taking special blood cells from a donor who is resistant to HIV and putting them into his own HIV infected blood. There are many dangers involved with this type of treatment, most notably the risk of transplanted stem cells recognizing the recipient’s body as foreign and attacking it. This process is extremely harmful to the recipient and can be fatal.

5 Things You Need to Know about the HIV Prevention Pill

It’s the little blue pill that could!  TIME magazine’s “Top Medical Breakthrough” of 2010 was a study called iPrEx which showed that taking a pill a day, called Truvada^®, can reduce the risk of contracting the virus by an average of 42% in men who have sex with men at risk for HIV.  This approach, called pre-exposure prophylaxis (or PrEP), has the potential to be a promising new tool we can add to the HIV prevention tool box.

But the study raised as many questions as it answered.  Now that the dust has settled a little, I want to probe a little deeper into the results and highlight some of the important points about what we do and don’t know about PrEP.

1.  The pill is already available for HIV treatment and shouldn’t be used for prevention without a physician’s supervision

The pill that was used in the study is called Truvada^® and is widely used to treat people living with HIV.  It is one of many medication options to treat HIV and was chosen for the study in part because it is generally well-tolerated, can be taken once a day, and has few interactions with other medications.

But because it is already on the market, it means that people may use the drug in ways that are different than the reasons it was licensed.  The pill is not a “morning after” pill and it’s not a “right before” pill either.  It’s actually a fairly rigorous regimen that requires people take the pill consistently.  Your doctor may prescribe it to you “off-label” for preventive use if you ask him or her, but the fact of the matter is we still don’t know yet if that’s a good idea for most people.  The CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) is gathering together experts and community members to discuss whether this pill should be recommended for PrEP use for men who have sex with men and trans females. They may have a decision about their recommendation late 2011 or early 2012.

If a person does decide to use PrEP, it’s very important to be sure of the person’s HIV status prior to starting PrEP because in the study there were cases of drug resistance when people began Truvada^® after they were already infected.  It’s also important to be regularly tested for HIV and monitored by a physician for safety while taking PrEP.