First The Australians…Now The Dutch: Gay Men In Amsterdam Having More Risky Sex

January 27th, 2011 | Author: Daseekah

There were previous reports that young gay australian men were increasingly having more unprotected sex than older men. New reports are now suggessting the dutch are following along the same footsteps. According to reuters, an increasing number of gay and bisexual men in Amsterdam are having unprotected sex, possibly explaining why their HIV rate has stopped falling and might even be inching up, a new study finds.

Researchers suspect that the trend — a reversal of the decline in risky sex seen in the 1980s — is related to the powerful anti-HIV drug “cocktails” that came into wide use in 1996.

The drugs, which can keep HIV from becoming full-blown AIDS and make an infected person less likely to pass the virus on, have altered many people’s view of HIV. Instead of a death sentence, it seems more like a manageable chronic disease.

But research suggests the drugs’ success may have had the unintended consequence of encouraging complacency about safer sex.

Several studies — in San Francisco, Sydney and the Netherlands, for example — have found that gay and bisexual men reported increasing rates of unprotected anal sex from the mid-1990s on.

This latest findings, reported in the journal AIDS, included 1,642 gay and bisexual men in Amsterdam who were followed for up to 25 years. Researchers found that from 1984 to 1988, the percentage of men who said they’d had unprotected anal sex in the past six months dropped from 78 percent to 33 percent. The rate then crept upward, reaching 38 percent in 1995, before jumping to 55 percent by 2009.