The Last March 2005 BBBJ Thread

[train]

Is there a microbiologist or infectious desease expert here ? I simply cannot find the answer to a question I have about contacting std's from BBBJ's .


NOTE THE IS NOT MEANT AS A SOAP BOX OPPORTUNITY

My question is , surprise , surprise, soley from the male perspective and for the moment let's limit it to say the HIV virus.

Ok ,

Is BBBJ more risky than DFK for the male in encounters with an infected female? And if so why?

a) in both cases the virus would be transmitted by the saliva of the HIV carrier

b) assume a scenerio of a circumsized male with no cuts or abrasions on his penis and not obvious cuts inside his mouth .

For BBJ to be more risky than DFK then :

1. The male's saliva must act as a virus killing agent?
2. The head of the penis is more absorbant than ones mouth or stomach ?
3 Can someone contribute another possible reason ?

Can someone fill me in here?

 

[Goober Mcfly]

One of the ladies who is trained in the health field is putting together something for everyone to refer to. It should be coming up in the next few days in the public announcement forum.

Is it an offer to participate in a study?

 

[Hard Idle]

If there was a weakness in the penis compared to the mouth, my guess would be the urethra (sp).

We must assume the evidence here is mostly theoretical. I mean how much stock can you really put in the percentages and risk ratios for each activity? Did hundreds healthy people actually volunteer for repeated exposure in order to establish how many exposures it usually takes for infection to take place? The calculations hinge on the honesty and accuracy of the information given by people who tested positive.

 

[Catherine]

The State of Oral Sex
A New Debate Over Safety in Sucking

by Duncan Osborne
February 19 - 25, 2003

How safe is oral sex? That question has been on the tip of many tongues ever since AIDS raised its deadly head. Now one expert says that fellatio may not be risky at all, at least when it comes to spreading HIV.

Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, who heads the sexually transmitted disease prevention effort at the San Francisco Department of Public Health, bases his conclusion on a new study of 239 gay or bisexual men who reported no anal or vaginal sex and no injection-drug use in the prior six months. Ninety-eight percent said they had given head without condoms. Twenty-eight percent said they knew their partner was HIV-positive, and of those, 39 percent said they had swallowed semen. None of the men became infected.

The risk of HIV transmission via oral sex, Klausner maintains, "is very, very, very, very, very low and may be zero."

A 2002 Spanish study supports Klausner's view. Researchers there followed 110 women and 25 men, all HIV-negative, for 10 years. Each participant had an HIV-positive partner. The investigators estimated that over the course of the study, the couples engaged in 19,000 acts of unprotected fellatio or cunnilingus. None of the negative partners converted.

A 1998 Emory University study analyzed 24 epidemiological investigations of HIV transmission via oral sex among heterosexuals or gay men. Generally, oral sex was not found to be a risk factor, though five of those studies concluded that among some gay men and crack users, sucking did transmit HIV.

"Yes, it does occur," says Richard Rothenberg, a professor at Emory University's School of Medicine. "It's probably a relatively small contribution to the epidemiology of HIV transmission."

Still, no piece of good news goes undebated.

Klausner's comments set off Rex Wockner, a journalist whose syndicated news stories and commentaries have appeared in the gay press for 18 years. "I know four people who I believe when they tell me that they seroconverted from sucking," Wockner told the Voice. Of those four friends, Wockner notes, one is now dead.

 

[Catherine]

"It's great news that guys in San Francisco are out there sucking dick and they are all still negative," Wockner says. "The unfortunate thing about this study is that nobody asked them how many times they did that. Doing it only once and staying negative doesn't prove a thing." Kimberly Page-Shafer, the San Francisco study's lead author, did not return phone calls from the Voice.

That may be, but it is indisputable that oral sex can transmit syphilis, gonorrhea, herpes, warts, and other diseases. (The city's health department recently noted a 50 percent increase in syphilis cases, mostly among gay men.) However, when it comes to HIV, researchers have two different missions. One is to document risky behavior for individuals; the other is to establish which practices could change the course of a deadly epidemic. Some researchers argue that if gay men adopted fellatio as their sole sexual behavior, the AIDS epidemic in that population would disappear.

But here, too, there is disagreement. Jim Koopman, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan and a highly regarded AIDS researcher, takes the risk of HIV transmission through oral sex among gay men seriously. He thinks the statistics used to bolster the claim that sucking is safe are faulty. "A standard analysis will not show the effects of oral sex," Koopman says. That's because, if an infected person is having both anal and oral sex, most researchers assume that anal sex is the source of the infection. Therefore, the effect of fellatio is masked. "Oral sex plays a key role," Koopman argues. "My feeling is if we are going to control HIV, we're going to have to take some actions along the line of stopping transmission from oral sex."

 

[Catherine]

The above is one of the many articles that I found on the net that agree that the spread of HIV is low with oral sex. But the risk of oher diseases are high....that is really what you need to worry about. Herpes, warts, hep are all incurable.


Catherine
xoxoxoxoxxo

 

[Svend]

You offer DFK and DATY which can also transmit those incurable diseases. It would be interesting to know if these are a lot lower risk than a BBBJ.

 

[wrong hole]

I heard you can't catch a disease when you get a bbbj in a swimming pool....as long as other people are swimming at the same time as you are recieving the bbbj.

I also heard you can't get pregnant this way too

 

[train]

Thanks Catherine . What you provided was probably what amounts to the only empirical evidence that may be available . Unfortunately there is always an element of anecdotal inference because , as Hard Idle notes , there are not a lot of controlled studies.

Perhaps HIV is a poor example due to saliva being , as far as bodily fluids are concerned , a poor conductor of the HIV virus - or so I have heard .

I'm interested in the mechanics of the exchange of fluids and the fluids themselves to more fully understand the risks . For example is it a waste of time to insist on cbj if you kiss ? And why ? If you could transmit this desease by kissing then it's surprising that everyone isn't infected . If you can't , then why would BBBJ be risky?

I just assumed that Daty was more dangerous than BBBJ as vaginal fluids are more potent than saliva. This may or may not be true .

Wrong Hole ........so most woman can hold their breath under water for 2 minutes . Would that just about do it for you ?

 

[enjoyall]

0.3%

I read somewhere that the chance of get infected by having intercourse with HIV positive parterner is 0.3%.

 

[Daddio]

I heard you can't catch a disease when you get a bbbj in a swimming pool....as long as other people are swimming at the same time as you are recieving the bbbj.

I also heard you can't get pregnant this way too

Yes but if someone sees you and tells your mother, then your peepee will fall off from embarrassment.

 

[Hard Idle]

Scientific facts must be repeatable & observable

These studies and anecdotes are encouraging with regard to HIV transmission. On the other hand I saw a TV show last year which profiled a gay man who claims he was monogamus with an HIV+ partner for 10 years, engaging only in oral sex - he tested negative dozens of times, then turned positive a few months after his partners death.

That story seemed legitimate, but in most cases you have to be skeptical about studies based on interviews. First such studies may discount answers which don't fit criteria or are not specific enough. Straigh or mostly straight people can be reluctant to fully disclose all homosexual experimentation, or other risky behaviour. Many Gays & Bi's could easily loose track of the number of partners and types of sex they've had (which category do Glory Holes go under?). People may be truly unable to account for sexathons where they mixed drugs & alchohol.

To be really scientific, you'd have to get hundreds of HIV+ men & women, then have them give & receive oral sex to separete groups of uninfected people repeatedly - all the while keeping the healthy participants in solitary confinment to prevent contamination from without - and run the experimnt for a couple of years, or until someone turns positive. I can't imagine where such a study would be legal, or how one could find enough volunteers.

For now it seems that without sores or abrasions, the chances of HIV transmission through oral are fairly low. I find Herpes & Syphylis much more intimidating with regard to DATY, BBBJ & DFK.