Health Officials Agree Undetectable HIV Levels Likely Mean Uninfectious

Medical organizations endorse the “Undetectable = Untransmissible” campaign, which aims to raise awareness of scientific evidence showing that virally suppressed people living with HIV cannot infect others.

Written byCatherine Offord

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More than 500 organizations from 67 countries have now endorsed a campaign promoting awareness that virally suppressed HIV-positive people cannot sexually transmit HIV. Launched in early 2016 to confront the stigma surrounding HIV infection, Prevention Access Campaign’s Undetectable = Untransmissible (U=U) movement has received support from major medical organizations including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

“The fact that people infected with HIV who are virally suppressed cannot sexually transmit the virus to others is now accepted in the HIV/AIDS community as a result of accumulating evidence since the early 2000s,” notes an editorial in The Lancet HIV, published earlier this month.

In particular, three large studies carried out in the last decade with couples practicing unprotected sex found zero reported cases of ...

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Meet the Author

Catherine Offord
After undergraduate research with spiders at the University of Oxford and graduate research with ants at Princeton University, Catherine left arthropods and academia to become a science journalist. She has worked in various guises at The Scientist since 2016. As Senior Editor, she wrote articles for the online and print publications, and edited the magazine’s Notebook, Careers, and Bio Business sections. She reports on subjects ranging from cellular and molecular biology to research misconduct and science policy. Find more of her work at her website.
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