cunnilingus-vaginal fluid

[terliksizterlik]

Hello,

Firstly, this is a great forum, thanks for that. (sorry for my bad english, not a native speaker)

One month ago, I had an unprotected cunnilingus and from then I have worries. I have been searching internet for information and I recently have encountered with this forum. Basically, you are saying that cunnilingus is not a risk for HIV since salvia somehow damage the HIV and regarding the all vaginal fluids only cervicovaginal fluid contains HIV. However, from thebody.com Doctor Robert Frascino says that "People are saying there is no HIV in the vaginal fluids of HIV-positive women? What? Who are these people said that? Have they been living under a rock for the last quarter century? That statement is obviously not true. Cervical/vaginal fluids from poz-women do contain HIV and these fluids are indeed considered infectious."  so can you give any scientific source to support your argument. Because your argument is a big relief for me, I hope yours is the correct one. Here is the link:

http://www.thebody.com/Forums/AIDS/SafeSex/Q174738.html

Another thing that comes to my mind is that, looking at the statistics of HIV transmission rates with vaginal or anal sex, the numbers are very low. For instance, due to the hiv/aids page from wikipedia; chance of infection from insertive penile-vaginal intercorse is 0.01%–0.38%. These numbers are so low that statistically it means zero. So how can hiv spread so widely with this infection rate? Do you believe that these numbers are accurate?

Thanks in advance

[jkinatl2]

I cannot carry on a conversation with Dr Fransisco, since he died in 2011.

But I will say that during his tenure at Thebody.com, his advice regarding oral sex of all sorts was, to put it mildly, inconsistent. Perhaps this is an artifact of thebody.com archiving obsolete information and placing it on the same pier as current information.

Perhaps he had not correctly remembered the epidemiology that places Women who have sex with Women quite clearly on the rare list of people virtually untouched by the AIDS pandemic. Perhaps he missed the  followup studies debunking not only the scant few reported cases of HIV via cunnilingus, but the notoriously unreliable method of patient report after the fact.

Perhaps he dd not read, or chose to ignore the three long-term studies of serodiscordant couples where absolutely NO infections were attributed to oral sex. In these studies, the patient bias was circumvented due to the conditions of the studies - that partners use condoms for penetrative anal/vaginal intercourse, but admitted upfront to using NO barriers at all for any form of oral sex.

Perhaps, as his health deteriorated, he was not able to keep up with the advances in HIV transmission theory - namely, identifying the dozen or so proteins and enzymes in saliva which render the virus inert, or determining that the Bartholen's Gland did not discharge infectious fluid. A shame, since he spent so much of his professional life providing risk assessment - and, incidentally, perpetuating obsolete information for reasons that will always remain unclear.

Although he did, in the post you refer, make his remarks about "cervical/vaginal" fluids - which gives me hope that he did, after all, understand exactly WHERE in the female anatomy the infectious fluids are located, and how they are transmitted. In a female with HIV, infectious fluids are located in the thick mucosa near the cervical area. This fluid does not migrate to the surface of the vagina, and is ONLY accessed by penile intercourse. Not fingers, not tongues.

And yes, the transmission rates for each act of intercourse ARE very low. The fact that we have a stable rate of transmission so many years after the simple message of condom use for penetrative anal.vaginal sex is a testimony to the rate at which people continue to practice unprotected sex.

In the ten years I have been giving out risk assessment on these forums, I have never, ever encountered a cunnilingus case that resulted in transmission. And to be frank, cunnilingus and fingering cases constitute the bulk of transmission worries on this part of the forum.

Of course, my personal viewpoint is essentially worthless. So I ask you to follow the epidemiological statistics for infection. Women who have sex with women simply do not appear on the HIV radar at all.

I am quite confident at saying that cunnilingus does not present an HIV risk.