# Quantified Risks of Gay Male Sex

If you are a gay male then you’ve probably worried at one point about sexually transmitted diseases. Indeed men who have sex with men have some of the highest prevalence of many of these diseases. And if you’re not a gay male, you’ve probably still thought about STDs at one point. But how much should you worry? There are many organizations and resources that will tell you to wear a condom, but very few will tell you the relative risks of wearing a condom vs not. I’d like to provide a concise summary of the risks associated with gay male sex and the extent to which these risks can be reduced. (See [Mark Manson’s guide](http://markmanson.net/std-guide/) for a similar resources for heterosexual sex.). I will do so by first giving some information about each disease, including its prevalence among gay men. Most of this data will come from the US, but the US actually has an unusually high prevalence for many diseases. Certainly HIV is much less common in many parts of Europe. I will end with a case study of HIV, which will include an analysis of the probabilities of transmission broken down by the nature of sex act and a discussion of risk reduction techniques.

When dealing with risks associated with sex, there are few relevant parameters. The most common is the prevalence – the proportion of people in the population that have the disease. Since you can only get a disease from someone who has it, the prevalence is arguably the most important statistic. There are two more relevant statistics – the per act infectivity (the chance of contracting the disease after having sex once) and the per partner infectivity (the chance of contracting the disease after having sex with one partner for the duration of the relationship). As it turns out the latter two probabilities are very difficult to calculate. I only obtained those values for for HIV. It is especially difficult to determine per act risks for specific types of sex acts since many MSM engage in a variety of acts with multiple partners. Nevertheless estimates do exist and will explored in detail in the HIV case study section.

**HIV**

Prevalence: Between 13 - 28%. My guess is about 13%.

The most infamous of the STDs. There is no cure but it can be managed with anti-retroviral therapy. A commonly reported statistic is that 19% of MSM (men who have sex with men) in the US are HIV positive (1). For black MSM, this number was 28% and for white MSM this number was 16%. This is likely an overestimate, however, since the sample used was gay men who frequent bars and clubs. My estimate of 13% comes from CDC's total HIV prevalence in gay men of 590,000 (2) and their data suggesting that MSM comprise 2.9% of men in the US (3).

**Gonorrhea**

Prevalence: Between 9% and 15% in the US

This disease affects the throat and the genitals but it is treatable with antibiotics. The CDC estimates 15.5% prevalence (4). However, this is likely an overestimate since the sample used was gay men in health clinics. Another sample (in San Francisco health clinics) had a pharyngeal gonorrhea prevalence of 9% (5).

**Syphilis**

Prevalence: 0.825% in the US

 My estimate was calculated in the same manner as my estimate for HIV. I used the CDC's data (6). Syphilis is transmittable by oral and anal sex (7) and causes genital sores that may look harmless at first (8). Syphilis is curable with penicillin however the presence of sores increases the infectivity of HIV.

**Herpes** (HSV-1 and HSV-2)

Prevalence: HSV-2 - 18.4% (9); HSV-1 - ~75% based on Australian data  (10)

This disease is mostly asymptomatic and can be transmitted through oral or anal sex. Sometimes sores will appear and they will usually go away with time. For the same reason as syphilis, herpes can increase the chance of transmitting HIV. The estimate for HSV-1 is probably too high. Snowball sampling was used and most of the men recruited were heavily involved in organizations for gay men and were sexually active in the past 6 months. Also half of them reported unprotected anal sex in the past six months. The HSV-2 sample came from a random sample of US households (11).

**Clamydia**

Prevalence: Rectal - 0.5% - 2.3% ; Pharyngeal - 3.0 - 10.5% (12)

 Like herpes, it is often asymptomatic - perhaps as low as 10% of infected men report symptoms. It is curable with antibiotics.

**HPV**

Prevalence: 47.2% (13)

 This disease is incurable (though a vaccine exists for men and women) but usually asymptomatic. It is capable of causing cancers of the penis, throat and anus. Oddly there are no common tests for HPV in part because there are many strains (over 100) most of which are relatively harmless. Sometimes it goes away on its own (14). The prevalence rate was oddly difficult to find, the number I cited came from a sample of men from Brazil, Mexico and the US.

**Case Study of HIV transmission; risks and strategies for reducing risk**

 IMPORTANT: None of the following figures should be generalized to other diseases. Many of these numbers are not even the same order of magnitude as the numbers for other diseases. For example, HIV is especially difficult to transmit via oral sex, but Herpes can very easily be transmitted.

Unprotected Oral Sex per-act risk (with a positive partner or partner of unknown serostatus):

Non-zero but very small. Best guess .03% without condom (15)

 _Unprotected Anal sex per-act risk (with positive partner): _

Receptive: 0.82% - 1.4% (16) (17)

  Insertive Circumcised: 0.11% (18)

          Insertive Uncircumcised: 0.62% (18)

 _Protected Anal sex per-act risk (with positive partner):  _

 Estimates range from 2 times lower to twenty times lower (16)  (19) and the risk is highly dependent on the slippage and breakage rate.

  

Contracting HIV from oral sex is very rare. In one study, 67 men reported performing oral sex on at least one HIV positive partner and none were infected (20). However, transmission is possible (15). Because instances of oral transmission of HIV are so rare, the risk is hard to calculate so should be taken with a grain of salt. The number cited was obtained from a group of individuals that were either HIV positive or high risk for HIV. The per act-risk with a positive partner is therefore probably somewhat higher.

 Note that different HIV positive men have different levels of infectivity hence the wide range of values for per-act probability of transmission. Some men with high viral loads (the amount of HIV in the blood) may have an infectivity of greater than 10% per unprotected anal sex act (17).

**Risk reducing strategies**

 Choosing sex acts that have a lower transmission rate (oral sex, protected insertive anal sex, non-insertive) is one way to reduce risk. Monogamy, testing, antiretroviral therapy, PEP and PrEP are five other ways.

_Testing Your partner/ Monogamy_

 If your partner tests negative then they are very unlikely to have HIV. There is a 0.047% chance of being HIV positive if they tested negative using a blood test and a 0.29% chance of being HIV positive if they tested negative using an oral test. If they did further tests then the chance is even lower. (See the section after the next paragraph for how these numbers were calculated).

 So if your partner tests negative, the real danger is not the test giving an incorrect result. The danger is that your partner was exposed to HIV before the test, but his body had not started to make antibodies yet. Since this can take weeks or months, it is possible for your partner who tested negative to still have HIV even if you are both completely monogamous.

 ____

For tests, the sensitivity - the probability that an HIV positive person will test positive - is 99.68% for blood tests (21), 98.03% with oral tests. The specificity - the probability that an HIV negative person will test negative - is 99.74% for oral tests and 99.91% for blood tests. Hence the probability that a person who tested negative will actually be positive is:

 P(Positive | tested negative) = P(Positive)*(1-sensitivity)/(P(Negative)\*specificity + P(Positive)\*(1-sensitivity)) = 0.047% for blood test, 0.29% for oral test

 Where P(Positive) = Prevalence of HIV, I estimated this to be 13%.

 However, according to a writer for About.com (22) - a doctor who works with HIV - there are often multiple tests which drive the sensitivity up to 99.997%.

_Home Testing_

Oraquick is an HIV test that you can purchase online and do yourself at home. It costs $39.99 for one kit. The sensitivity is 93.64%, the specificity is 99.87% (23). The probability that someone who tested negative will actually be HIV positive is 0.94%. - assuming a 13% prevalence for HIV. The same danger mentioned above applies - if the infection occurred recently the test would not detect it.

 _Anti-Retroviral therapy_

 Highly active anti-retroviral therapy (HAART), when successful, can reduce the viral load – the amount of HIV in the blood - to low or undetectable levels. Baggaley et. al (17) reports that in heterosexual couples, there have been some models relating viral load to infectivity. She applies these models to MSM and reports that the per-act risk for unprotected anal sex with a positive partner should be 0.061%. However, she notes that different models produce very different results thus this number should be taken with a grain of salt.

 _Post-Exposure Prophylaxis (PEP)_

 A last resort if you think you were exposed to HIV is to undergo post-exposure prophylaxis within 72 hours. Antiretroviral drugs are taken for about a month in the hopes of preventing the HIV from infecting any cells. In one case controlled study some health care workers who were exposed to HIV were given PEP and some were not, (this was not under the control of the experimenters). Workers that contracted HIV were less likely to have been given PEP with an odds ratio of 0.19 (24). I don’t know whether PEP is equally effective at mitigating risk from other sources of exposure.

 _Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP)_

 This is a relatively new risk reduction strategy. Instead of taking anti-retroviral drugs after exposure, you take anti-retroviral drugs every day in order to prevent HIV infection. I could not find a per-act risk, but in a randomized controlled trial, MSM who took PrEP were less likely to become infected with HIV than men who did not (relative reduction  - 41%). The average number of sex partners was 18. For men who were more consistent and had a 90% adherence rate, the relative reduction was better - 73%. (25) (26).

1: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5937a2.htm?s\_cid=mm5937a2\_w

2: http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/statistics/basics/ataglance.html

3: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/ad/ad362.pdf

4: http://www.cdc.gov/std/stats10/msm.htm

5: http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/41/1/67.short

6: http://www.cdc.gov/std/syphilis/STDFact-MSM-Syphilis.htm

7: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5341a2.htm

8: http://www.cdc.gov/std/syphilis/stdfact-syphilis.htm

9: http://journals.lww.com/stdjournal/Abstract/2010/06000/Men\_Who\_Have\_Sex\_With\_Men\_in\_the\_United\_States\_.13.aspx

10: http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/content/194/5/561.full

11: http://www.nber.org/nhanes/nhanes-III/docs/nchs/manuals/planop.pdf

12: http://www.cdc.gov/std/chlamydia/STDFact-Chlamydia-detailed.htm

13: http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/content/203/1/49.short

14: http://www.cdc.gov/std/hpv/stdfact-hpv-and-men.htm

15: [http://journals.lww.com/aidsonline/pages/articleviewer.aspx?year=1998&issue=16000&article=00004&type=fulltext#P80](http://journals.lww.com/aidsonline/pages/articleviewer.aspx?year=1998&issue=16000&article=00004&type=fulltext#P80)

16: http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/150/3/306.short

17: [http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2010/04/20/ije.dyq057.full](http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2010/04/20/ije.dyq057.full)

18: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2852627/

19:

http://journals.lww.com/stdjournal/Fulltext/2002/01000/Reducing\_the\_Risk\_of\_Sexual\_HIV\_Transmission_.7.aspx

20:

http://journals.lww.com/aidsonline/Fulltext/2002/11220/Risk\_of\_HIV\_infection\_attributable\_to\_oral_sex.22.aspx

21: [http://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099%2811%2970368-1/abstract](http://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099%2811%2970368-1/abstract)

22:

[http://aids.about.com/od/hivpreventionquestions/f/How-Often-Do-False-Positive-And-False-Negative-Hiv-Test-Results-Occur.htm](http://aids.about.com/od/hivpreventionquestions/f/How-Often-Do-False-Positive-And-False-Negative-Hiv-Test-Results-Occur.htm)

23: [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18824617](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18824617)

24: [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD002835.pub3/abstract](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD002835.pub3/abstract)

25: http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/Nejmoa1011205#t=articleResults

26: h[ttp://www.cmaj.ca/content/184/10/1153.short](http://www.cmaj.ca/content/184/10/1153.short)