Swedes Are Dangerously Naïve about HIV
The number of newly infected Swedish gay men with HIV has doubled in a year. Never before has there been this many people living with the virus. But people are still extremely unaware of this. In fact, if one reads the mainstream media, it's easy to get the impression that HIV is extremely rare and only affects a handful of people. As a result, the media is making headline news whenever a man or a woman with HIV is caught having sex. This, in turn, is a result of Sweden's unique disease-control legislation, which gives the authorities the right to imprison a person with HIV on suspicion that he or she might have unprotected sex in the future. (No kidding, only Cuba has similar laws!)
Swedes like to think that HIV doesn't concern them. Unfortunately, this attitude has spread to the gay community, where a new generation of teenagers and twenty-somethings have unsafe sex on the naïve assumption that someone with HIV will tell them before having sex.
In the public debate on this issue, it's assumed that a person with HIV is always a superhuman who never gets drunk, takes drugs, has one-night-stands, or offers sex for money. This is a potentially lethal naivety.
Queer activist Tomas Hemstad has written an excellent article about this. I recommend it to anyone able to read Swedish. Here is an extract:
Av de större städer, städer med en homosexuell infrastruktur, som jag har vistats i, är Stockholm sämst på hiv. Det finns ingen dialog, ingen öppenhet, ingen solidaritet, hivpositiva finns i stort sett inte annat än som statistik. Detta är förödande. Hiv är kanske ingen bögpest men om vi inte erkänner sjukdomen i bögvärlden, så kommer aldrig den strejta världen haka på.
I was reading up on HIV recently, and one thing I was surprised to learn that I don't think too many people know about, is that people are most contagious in the few months after they are infected, up to 20 times more contagious, before any standard HIV antibody test works. Most people, myself included, probably think that people were most contagious at the end stage of the disease.
To give my brief medical explanation of it, this is because the body goes through a period called 'seroconversion', about a month after being infected, where antibodies against HIV are made. Before this, the body is basically defenseless against the virus, and the numbers of virus rise. After this seroconversion, the amount of virus drops dramatically in the system, if I remember correctly, from about maybe 500,000 to maybe 5,000, and your chances of getting infected are much much less.
So when you start a new relationship, or have an on and off relationship, that is the most important time to be careful. See, we are always seeing ads about getting tested, but by the time your test works, it can be too late. There are other tests, such as a viral load test, that may be more effective in finding out early, even though they are expensive. Anyway, I think the gay community should get the word out on this in the media if they care about this issue, and tell people that being tested with the standard tests is sometimes too late.