San Francisco: Getting Poz Guys to Use Condoms No Easy Task

Over the last two decades, the arguments used to convince gay men to use condoms tended to speak only to those guys who were HIV-negative. The "use a condom" message tended not to address those men infected with HIV. Now the message is aimed at getting HIV-positive men to use a condom, and this is not always an easy task.

"Someone who is HIV-positive figures I have nothing else to lose," said Andre Robertson, director of prevention at the Black Coalition on AIDS. "Some of the positive men I talk to give good, logical reasons for not using condoms." Countering those reasons is becoming imperative for health officials as they battle rising rates not only HIV but also other STDs. Getting men to use condoms remains their number one weapon in stemming the epidemic.

"If you are going to be on the bottom, make sure a top uses a condom. If you are going to be on top, make sure you use a condom. If we could do that we could probably eliminate 90 percent of the new infections in San Francisco," said Dr. Thomas Coates, director of the University of California-San Francisco Center for AIDS Prevention Studies.

It is not just about using a condom with negative men. According to Project Inform, when both partners have HIV, they still need to consider several points about their sexual activity. These include the fact that infections like cytomegalovirus (CMV), human papillomavirus (HPV), herpes, and hepatitis (B and C), among others, remain major concerns for people with HIV and that reinfection with a drug-resistant or more aggressive strain remains a theoretical possibility.

Teddy Partridge, the Stop AIDS Project's South of Market neighborhood organizer, uses these facts to talk to men who have sex with men about the importance of safe sex. According to Partridge,"60 percent of the syphilis cases are among positive men." The CDC has allocated $3.8 million this year to fund "Prevention for Positives" programs in California, Maryland and Wisconsin.

Back to other CDC news for September 10, 2002

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