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Study: Many Florida men disclose HIV status before having unprotected sex

Posted at 3:15 AM, Feb 06, 2019
and last updated 2019-02-05 22:29:53-05

(WTXL) - Many HIV-positive men in Florida are disclosing their status and then having unprotected sex, a new study found.

Men who disclosed to partners they were HIV positive were three times more likely to have sex without a condom, according to a study co-authored by a researcher at the University of Central Florida.

"You’d expect that, if people disclosed that they have HIV, there would be condom use because there would be a risk involved," says Christa Cook, an associate professor in UCF’s College of Nursing and lead author of the study, which included researchers from the University of Florida.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that Florida has the second-highest rate of new HIV infection diagnoses in the nation.

The study, written about in UCF Today, appeared recently in the journal PLOS One and was partially funded by the National Institutes of Health.

It found that 45 percent of the men surveyed either inconsistently disclosed or did not disclose their HIV status to their partners.

They also found that counseling patients about preventing the spread of HIV did not seem to be related to disclosing HIV status to their partners.

The findings suggest changes may be needed in how counseling of HIV patients is done.

"As a nurse, we are supposed to do prevention counseling with our clients and tell them ways that they can protect themselves, either through condom use or pre-exposure prophylaxis," Cook says. "We found out that prevention counseling was not a predictor. Prevention counseling wasn’t associated with the rates of disclosure or condomless sex.”

Pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, for HIV are drugs that reduce the risk of contracting HIV.

The research team performed the study by analyzing data provided by the Florida Department of Health HIV Surveillance Program.

The program is a partnership with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, which surveys and monitors respondents who are living with HIV/AIDS and are receiving care.

The researchers looked at data from Florida from 2009 to 2013, the most current data available.

The men studied were sexually active in the year previous to responding to the survey, had two or more sexual partners, and had not been newly diagnosed within the past year of answering the survey. The final sample was data from 376 men.

Cook says more research is needed to understand how to increase the rate of disclosure and why men who disclose are more likely to have sex without a condom.