Mixed status HIV couples conceiving

[Medusa]

It seems medical science is moving really forward! There is an increase in mixed hiv status couples *one is HIV+ and the other negative, conceiving.

With a greater understanding of the HIV virus and new meds available, more medical professionals are telling couples with one infected partner that unprotected sex could be a safe option for having children.
In the case of Susan and Dan Hartmann, they'd always been careful to have protected sex as he was HIV-positive. But when they wanted to start a family, doctors at the University of California at San Francisco said the best course of action might be unprotected sex.

what do you think?
sauce

[monsno_leedra]

Re: Mixed status HIV couples conceiving

Lots of assumptions there.

[Medusa]

Re: Mixed status HIV couples conceiving

Lots of assumptions there.

In which direction?

[B. de Corbin]

Re: Mixed status HIV couples conceiving

I have seen reports of HIV infants cured of HIV. It may be that HIV - in the case of infants - is a curable disease.

I honestly don't know, though... I'm not a qualified medical professional, and not well versed on the research.

[anunitu]

Re: Mixed status HIV couples conceiving

I would be nervous,were I young enough to father a kid. I mean would you want to take a chance of bringing a child into a world where they "might" be collared with HIV. Maybe the medical people have found a way to insure that could not happen,but what are the odds here?

[monsno_leedra]

Re: Mixed status HIV couples conceiving

In which direction?

Sorry got side tracked as I was answering that.

I think there is a lot of assumptions about how HIV / AIDS is transmitted and to what degree it can be passed. Passed to both the child that is conceived through the union of an infected parent and an uninfected parent. It also seems to assume an awful lot in regards to the transfer of the virus and component parts and how each will affect / effect the uninfected partner.

To date there is no curable 100 percent conclusive result from any medication that I am aware of. To suggest it is not contagious seems to be as correlatable with facts as saying being gay is a choice and not something a person is born with or as. That some doctors believe and take both sides of the argument as fact doesn't change the historical data and analysis of those data sets.

Yes there is always the possibility that a person with the virus might impregnate a partner without actually transmitting the virus to either the partner or child. Yet for me that is one bullet i'd not care to take the chance of firing and killing another. Not unless medically they can guarantee that the infected person is cured or absolutely can not pass the virus to another.

Sometimes the rights of people have to be restricted less they endanger the lives of others.

[thalassa]

Re: Mixed status HIV couples conceiving

HIV is an extremely well studied disease. The push for treatments and a vaccine has left research very well funded. If it had been something more like measles or polio in which we had a natural immune response, we would have had those things already. I don't think its fair to say that it assumes too much, or that these people's doctors are saying its not contagious. We know how much of a viral load is required for infection to take place, we know how to test for the presence of HIV in blood (and yes, there are people that go years with undetectable levels, and there are even a few folks that really do seem to have been "cured"--kids, a guy with a bone marrow treatment, etc).

Its not like this couple's doctors were telling them to wantonly throw away the protection and fuck like bunnies.. They told a couple where the guy has a "viral load so low as to be undetectable, if they only had sex a few times while she was ovulating (something else we can detect with precision) studies showed the risk of transmission was extremely small". And that couple made a calculated risk of a statistically insignificant possibility in an environment where medical science has come a very long way n terms of treatments.

I don't see this as any different than a couple where both parentsknow they are cystic fibrosis carriers having kids naturally....heck, they have a higher chance of making a sick baby (25%) without a cure with a disease that will drastically shorten their natural lifespan (though less so today than 10 or 20 years ago). Or what about the family that decided to sail around the world, only to have their very young child sicken (from an illnesss she probably wouldn't have gotten at home...or if she did, she would have had an extreme proximity to medical care), and their boat sink, with them needing rescue by the coast guard?

Perhaps we should be debating that...is it ethical for parents to knowingly risk the life and health of their own children? Then again, isn't that what life is--a series of calculated risks that hopefully only affect ourselves, or those that have implicitly or explicitly joined their lives to ours? I let my kid ride bikes and do gymnastics and ride horses and play outside and use knives and talk to strangers and swim in the ocean and got out of my sight in public places...you know how many kids have died or been irreparably injured doing some of those things?