Diagnosed positive for HIV in 2007, actor Billy Porter had never made his illness public until now, fearing in particular professional discrimination.
- In France, men who have sex with men and foreign-born heterosexual women remain the two groups most affected by HIV, and represent respectively 43% and 37% of reported HIV findings between January 2019 and September 2020. .
- Injecting drug users (IDU) and transgender people infected through sexual intercourse each represent 2% of the total cases.
It’s a subject he didn’t dare talk about for 14 years. The star of the hit series “Pose” Billy Porter has just revealed to the HollywoodReporter that he was diagnosed with HIV in 2007.
“The shame that I had accumulated in my life forced me into silence”
“The shame of that time and the shame that I had accumulated in my life forced me into silence and I lived in silence for 14 years”, he said. “Being HIV positive where I come from, in the Pentecostal church with a very religious family, is a divine punishment”. He adds : “I was trying to have a life and a career and I wasn’t sure if it was possible if the wrong people knew about it,” specifying that he had never spoken of his HIV status with his colleagues in the series “Pose”.
“It would have been another way for some people to discriminate against me in an already discriminating profession. So I tried to think about it as little as possible, but the quarantine (and the health crisis linked to Covid-19, editor’s note) taught me a lot”, he continues. The goal of the actor is also to send a positive message to all patients: “This is what an HIV-positive person looks like: II’ve never been healthier in my entire life (…) It’s time to tell another story. There’s no more stigma, let’s stop with that.”
When is a viral load said to be undetectable?
According to a survey conducted by the Sida Info Service association between July and October 2019 among 328 people living with HIV, 67.4% of respondents thought they had already been discriminated against because of their HIV status and 64.6% of discrimination dated back to a year or less. However, an HIV-positive person on antiretroviral treatment with an undetectable viral load for more than 6 months and who benefits from regular and comprehensive clinical monitoring (support for adherence, detection and treatment of STIs) does not transmit HIV.
The viral load is said to be undetectable when the quantity of a virus in the blood is below a certain threshold (<50 copies/mL). However, the person remains an HIV carrier and must continue to follow their treatment. The maintenance of the undetectable viral load must be checked every 3 months during the 1st year, then every 6 months if the clinical and biological assessment is normal.
HIV figures in France
In 2019, 6.2 million HIV serologies were performed by medical biology laboratories, according to Public Health France. HIV testing activity has increased since 2014 (+10% over the entire 2014-2018 period), and this increase accelerated in 2019 (+6% between 2018 and 2019). This increase in screening activity in 2019 was accompanied by an increase in the number of confirmed positive serologies (+6% over 2018-2019). The positivity rate, which had decreased between 2014 and 2018, stabilized in 2019 at 1.9 per thousand serologies.
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