Question
Is my girlfriend protected from HIV? Can we have a baby?
29 April 2010. Related: All topics, HIV transmission, Pregnancy.
I am HIV positive but my girlfriend is not. We have been dating for six years and I was diagnosed HIV positive in 2008. I am now on Truvada and Viramune. My viral load is undetectable and I have a CD4 count of 250.
I want to know whether my girlfriend is immune to HIV because we had unprotected sex for six years prior to my diagnosis and she remained negative. If so would it be safe to continue having unprotected sex with her and possibly a baby?
Answer
Thank you for your question.
It is good to hear that you are responding to treatment and that you are still together with your partner. It must have been a difficult time coming to terms with your diagnosis.
You ask an interesting and important questions about your partner, but it isn’t one that has a definite answer. This has been reported before in the context of a monogamous heterosexual relationship when about one-third of woman in a similar situation to your partner, have been shown not to catch HIV. This was seen in earliest years of the epidemic, in the partners of men with haemophilia who had been infected with HIV many years earlier. This was thought to be explained by developing a strong local response to one virus, but I think this is still just a theory.
Your partner may have a genetic protection against HIV due to a genetic mutation (called delta 32 deletion). Even if this is the case, and less than 2% of Caucasians have this, there is no commercial test, and it still may not guarantee protection.
Perhaps most likely is that your partner could just have been lucky in not having caught HIV after many exposures. Sometimes it might take hundreds of exposure though before someone is unlucky and becomes infected. So using condoms from now 0n, other than when trying for a baby, would probably be recommended by most healthcare professionals.
You can still try for a baby with your girlfriend bit you will both need to be informed and aware of the safest ways to to this, and for any risk, however small, to be acceptable to both of you.
If you are stable on medication with an undetectable viral load for more than 6 months and neither of you has any other sexually transmitted infections then the likelihood of your girlfriend becoming HIV positive is very small. You should be able to conceive naturally with your wife and child still remaining HIV negative.
If you decide to do this then you and your wife should discuss this with your HIV doctor. Together with your doctor you can work out the time of the month when your wife is most fertile. This way you can plan to only have unprotected sex at a time when it is possible for conception to occur. The rest of the time you can protect your wife from HIV by using a condom.
For more information on pregnancy and HIV please follow this link to our ‘Guide to HIV, Pregnancy and Women’s Health’.
This section discusses choices for conception where the man is HIV-positive and the woman is HIV-negative.