THE MYTH OF HETEROSEXUAL AIDs (cont.):

The State of Oral Sex: A New Debate Over Safety in Sucking (Duncan Osborne, February 19 - 25, 2003, Village Voice)

How safe is oral sex? That question has been on the tip of many tongues ever since AIDS raised its deadly head. Now one expert says that fellatio may not be risky at all, at least when it comes to spreading HIV.

Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, who heads the sexually transmitted disease prevention effort at the San Francisco Department of Public Health, bases his conclusion on a new study of 239 gay or bisexual men who reported no anal or vaginal sex and no injection-drug use in the prior six months. Ninety-eight percent said they had given head without condoms. Twenty-eight percent said they knew their partner was HIV-positive, and of those, 39 percent said they had swallowed semen. None of the men became infected.

The risk of HIV transmission via oral sex, Klausner maintains, "is very, very, very, very, very low and may be zero."

This has been self-evident for twenty years but like much about the disease has been little discussed for political reasons. Any data that tends to reveal how limited are the circumstances under which you can contract AIDs gets swept under the rug. Posted by Orrin Judd at February 18, 2003 8:13 PM