The Edmonton doctor and infectious disease specialist is seeing more people with more severe sexually transmitted infections – young men with chlamydia and hemorrhagic proctitis who say they’ve had 30-odd partners in the past six months and didn’t use condoms half the time; seemingly healthy people who’ve been on intensive HIV treatment for ages and have contracted syphilis, gonorrhea, hepatitis C from unprotected sex.
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Julio Montaner, who made a name for himself internationally through his work in HIV/AIDS treatment as prevention, does not buy the hypothesis that advances in tackling HIV/AIDS have made people have riskier sex.
“It has been long part of the folklore that if and when a treatment became available for HIV, or a prevention became available, that it could lead to behavioural dis-inhibition,” he said.
“The truth is that whenever this issue has been monitored carefully there is no evidence that people change their behaviour as a result of accessing treatment or even pre-exposure prophylaxis.”