Kate88 wrote: ↑Fri Jul 10, 2020 10:23 pm
Some people suggested 'testing yourself and partner' before sex which is a complete nonsense (sorry I don't mean to be rude but it is). Many STDs like HIV are not detectable for weeks and months, and most tests are cheap and don't cover full disease range. So me or my partner could take a test get a false negative, immediately or because of a delay in virus development. Same story as with covid. Proper exhaustive STD testing which covers 99% of diseases costs at least £400 in London, and it takes weeks to get the results back, look it up. Obviously no-one is going to do that or wait just for some potential FWB. Nothing will ever replace the safety of condoms. I had bareback sex on a few occasions and still do oral unprotected but only with my long standing boyfriend and my husband. Luckily I haven't caught anything that I'm aware of.
I probably put forward that 'nonsense' ;-) let me motivate the reasons to be tested! 4th gen HIV testing is accurate moderately fast:
The median window period is 18 days (interquartile range 13 to 24 days). This indicates that half of all infections would be detected between 13 and 24 days after exposure.
99% of HIV-infected individuals would be detectable within 44 days of exposure.
The more important point is that HIV does not reach high viral loads for months and so can be detected long before someone is going to actively transmit (viral load matters a lot which is why at this point HIV+ individuals taking antiretrovirals and undetectable viral load are considered to not transmit. Home (antibody) tests are accurate at 3 months and cost about $40.
I understand that the NHS may not do HIV testing on-demand and so in that context, maybe you need to go to expensive / private. Today, I can get free HIV testing in most major cities in the US because policy makers long since recognized that removing barriers to testing is far less expensive than caring for people who have full blown AIDS.
I can get tested on request with my regular health care provider and if I go and ask for HIV she will also add a full STI batter. It wasn't always this way, however in my community (queer / poly / leatherfolk) the standard for all the time I've been at it (25 years) is people who actively see multiple partners get tested 4x per year, if you're not as active, annually would be considered minimum.
Also, back then we had to worry that if your insurance company learned you had an HIV test, your insurance could be cancelled and so a lot of labs offered anonymous testing - you never gave your name or ID and were provided with an ID number to call back and check results.
Condoms are only 70% effective against HIV, while PrEP is better than 90% effective. I have a PrEP prescription that I can take if I care to have sex with a guy (as long as my sex is F-F, my risk is effectively zero). See the recent thread about PrEP for details, testing is mandatory before starting PrEP.
I also am OK doing oral without barriers, subject to my partner's preference.