Department of Sex Research
Low risk of getting HIV/AIDS from oral sex
According to a study in a recent issue of AIDS, the risk of getting HIV/AIDS from oral sex is vastly overstated. Researchers in Spain studied 135 heterosexual couples in which one of the partners was HIV-positive. The couples had oral sex an estimated 19,000 times during a 10-year period. And not one uninfected partner contracted the virus during the study. These results confirm a study by Kimberly Page Shafer of the University of California at San Francisco’s Center for AIDS Prevention Studies. Last year she reported that of 198 gay and bisexual men she studied who only had oral sex, none of them became infected with HIV, even though some had oral sex with HIV-positive partners. According to Shafer, oral sex is “a much lower risk than perhaps people have been led to believe.”
