Chinese Aids study raises flag over drugs as prevention

A Chinese study published on World Aids Day on Saturday 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 antiretrovirals 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 careful 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 per cent, 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 antiretrovirals 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.