Introduction

One of the features that has undermined much AIDS education so far has been the tendency to provide disempowering rather than enabling information. Information which over–emphasises very small risks at the expense of concentrating on the demonstrably greater risks of penetrative intercourse and sharing injecting equipment is likely to undermine the success of HIV prevention strategies which concentrate on risk reduction rather than risk elimination (See HIV prevention: which methods work? for a discussion of risk reduction and risk elimination approaches).

This section looks at how information about HIV transmission has been gathered, and at cases which appear to suggest new routes of transmission in addition to the well–established routes of sexual intercourse, sharing injecting equipment, mother–to–baby and blood transfusion/blood products. We provide a detailed account of some of these anomalies because they have bred so much uncertainty.

We also offer a critical method for looking at any new proposed routes of transmission, since one of the key tasks facing anyone giving advice on AIDS and HIV is responding to the seemingly endless flow of new possible risks and old misinformation.