How to Have Safe Sex When You or Your Partner Have HIV

If you or your partner just found out you have HIV, you might wonder if sex and intimacy are off the table. The short answer is no."People with HIV are able to live full, healthy lives as long as they take their medications," said Jessica Zajesky, RN, BS, AASN, a clinical care coordinator and triage nurse in the Division of HIV Medicine at Albany Medical Health System in New York. Here's what you need to know to protect yourself and your partner if one of you has HIV. U=U: Undetectable means untransmittable HIV medicine, called antiretroviral therapy (ART), stops the virus from making copies of itself. Over time, the amount of virus in the blood can drop so low that standard tests can't find it. This is called an undetectable viral load."When you get undetectable and stay undetectable, you cannot sexually transmit HIV to your partners," Zajesky said. "Not 'probably won't' or 'the risk is very small.' You will not sexually transmit HIV."That's the idea behind U=U, or Undetectable = Untransmittable, and science backs it up. A 2023 review in The Lancet looked at eight studies of more than 7,700 couples where one partner had HIV and the other did not. Researchers found only two possibl...