ACCM wholeheartedly lends its voice to Prevention Access Campaign’s U=U consensus statement confirming that people whose viral loads are undetectable cannot pass HIV onto their sexual partners. This means that when someone adheres to antiretroviral treatment they are able to reduce the level of HIV in their blood to the point that it no longer shows up on tests and is too insignificant to transmit.

This pivotal development in HIV research has momentous implications for the lives of both HIV positive and negative people. It’s a cause for celebration and ACCM commits to sharing the benefits of treatment as prevention in our efforts to abolish stigma. Despite promising medical advances, people living with HIV continue to experience prejudice, which manifests everywhere from the workplace to online dating sites. It is only in overcoming this stigma that we may collectively concentrate on barriers to treatment adherence: food security, housing, poverty, and social isolation.

Through universal access to antiretroviral therapy and HIV testing, we can begin to imagine a world without HIV. We are given hope that we can now confidently state that “undetectable equals untransmittable.” We congratulate people living with HIV and their allies for their activism, their dedication to ending the epidemic, and advocating for the advances in treatment that have rendered U=U possible.

Please read the full statement here:

https://www.preventionaccess.org/consensus