HIV treatment to prevent HIV
If you are living with HIV, taking HIV treatment can help you to live a long and healthy life.
Another important benefit of HIV treatment is that it helps prevent HIV from passing to others.
Successful HIV treatment that lowers the amount of virus in your body to undetectable levels (called having an undetectable viral load) means you will not pass HIV to the people you have sex with. This is life-changing for many people living with HIV, because it can reduce anxiety about passing HIV and helps to reduce HIV stigma.
Having an undetectable viral load also lowers the chance of passing HIV when sharing equipment for injecting drugs, but we don’t know by exactly how much.
For people who want to get pregnant, maintaining an undetectable viral load throughout pregnancy prevents HIV from being passed to the baby during pregnancy and delivery.
To learn more about this and other ways of preventing HIV, read on.