Oral sex may be important risk factor for HIV infection

A study of homosexual men living in San Francisco who were recently infected with HIV-1 suggests that in about 7% of cases the virus was likely to have been transmitted during oral sex.

Dr Frederick Hecht of the University of California, San Francisco, and colleagues there and at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta evaluated 122 people recently diagnosed with HIV-1 infection who were presumed to have acquired their infection between June …