Medical Questions » AIDS Questions » Question No. 13
| Question: | Is AIDS still a risk for couple who have normal male/female sex? |
| Answer: | The risk in western countries of transmitting AIDS from one person to another is highest in injecting drug users and homosexuals, but it is still a problem with heterosexual sex. The saying that when you have sex with someone, you are biologically having sex with every other person that your partner has had sex with, is still true. Although less than one in ten AIDS cases occur from heterosexual sex in western countries, there is still the risk of other sexually transmitted diseases.
In Africa and Asia, the situation is vastly different, with virtually all cases of AIDS occurring with male/female sexual contacts. In some African countries, up to one in three people in the entire population have AIDS, while in southeast Asia one in 20 people in Cambodia are infected.
The incidence of AIDS has steadily dropped for several years in developed countries with better education, and safe sex techniques (eg. using condoms), but seems to have reached a plateau now, with new cases being diagnosed at about one third the rate they were at the peak of infections in the early nineties. About 600 people a year in Australia catch AIDS every year. |
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