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Meeting People Living With HIV

If you have concerns about meeting someone living with HIV, it is important to educate yourself about how HIV is and is not transmitted. Knowing the facts can make your interactions go much more smoothly and can avoid potentially embarrassing or probing questions. As when meeting anyone, you should extend common courtesy.

  1. Casual Contact

    • HIV is not transmitted through casual contact like hugging, shaking hands, sharing a drinking glass or other dishes, or even casual kissing. Nor is any form of HIV airborne, so you cannot contract the virus when an HIV-positive person coughs or sneezes. HIV must cross the body's blood barrier in sufficient concentration to trigger an infection, which does not occur through casual contact.

    Shared Facilities

    • It is also not possible to contract HIV through the use of shared facilities like toilets, showers and swimming pools. Even if an HIV-positive person became injured and began actively bleeding in a swimming pool, there would be no risk of infection because the virus would become diluted in the water and be neutralized by the chlorine; even hand soap neutralizes HIV.

    Precautions with Advanced HIV

    • If you are meeting someone with advanced HIV in a hospital setting, expect that you may be asked to participate in infection-control measures; this is to prevent you from transmitting a potentially dangerous infection to someone with a severely compromised immune system. According to HIV InSite, these measures may include hand washing prior to the visit, avoiding contact with people who have viral infections and wearing a respirator mask for certain symptoms.

    Sensitivity

    • You may have many questions about HIV, but it is better to turn to educational materials (see Resources below) to seek out answers than asking someone with the disease. No one likes feeling as though people think of them as diseased, and some people may not want to discuss HIV in either the abstract or the particulars of their own life. However, if an HIV-positive person does seem to want to discuss their experience, listen to them as you would another friend or acquaintance, as many people find sharing their experiences can be helpful.

    Dating

    • Both HIV-positive and uninfected people make decisions about whether to date or engage in sexual activity with HIV-positive people. Serosorting is the practice of using HIV status as a criterion for determining who to have sex with; seroconcordant couples are either both HIV-positive or HIV-negative, while in serodiscordant couples, one partner is HIV-positive and the other is HIV-negative. There are resources available to help HIV-positive people find others who are interested in dating other positive people. Remember that the correct and consistent use of condoms is important to help prevent HIV transmission and the transmission of other infections that may have severe effects on immunocompromised people.

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