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The early stages of HIV infection are characterized by a high viral burden in blood and semen, which increases the risk for viral transmission. Knowing the proportion of HIV transmission that occurs during early infection is important for developing prevention strategies. Investigators in Quebec recently used comparative phylogenetic analysis to explore HIV transmission patterns among 593 patients with early HIV infection (<6 months after seroconversion) and 795 patients with chronic HIV infection.
Of 593 early infections, 293 (49.4%) segregated into one of 75 transmission clusters, with 2 to 17 infections per cluster. Half of these clusters included a mean of 2.7 infections; the other half, a mean of 8.8 infections. In contrast, only 21 of …