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Asha Persson [1] and Christy E. Newman [1] and Myra Hamilton [2] and Joanne Bryant [1] and Jack Wallace [3] and kylie valentine [2]

Academic Editor: Mary E. Marquart

1, Centre for Social Research in Health, Goodsell Building, Level 3, UNSW, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia, unsw.edu.au

2, Social Policy Research Centre, Goodsell Building, Level 3, UNSW, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia, unsw.edu.au

3, Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health & Society, La Trobe University, 215 Franklin Street, Melbourne, VIC 3000, Australia, latrobe.edu.au

Received Jul 6, 2017; Accepted Sep 14, 2017

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

1. Introduction

In the contemporary “treatment era,” blood-borne viruses are undergoing profound changes. New biomedical technologies to prevent HIV infection have enlivened hopes of ending the global epidemic [1] and are transforming social and sexual relations due to the significantly reduced risk of transmission and the possibility of conception without clinical interventions [2–4]. The recent introduction of highly effective treatments for hepatitis C, which are also far less arduous than earlier treatment, is setting up radical expectations that the virus can be globally eliminated by 2030 [5]. Similar ambitions for hepatitis B have recognised the need to scale up screening, treatment, and childhood vaccination to help prevent the kind of intergenerational transmission of the virus that has led to significant morbidity and mortality among many populations [5].

In this article, we make the case for extending the concept of “serodiscordance” in the context of this current treatment moment, with all of the associated promises, possibilities, and unknown knock-on effects it brings. “Serodiscordance” is widely used in the HIV literature to describe a relationship between two people with different viral statuses, in other words a person with a virus and another person without it. It is most commonly associated with HIV, but it does appear in the hepatitis C literature, though not in the hepatitis B literature. The concept of serodiscordance has been crucial in beginning to shift the emphasis beyond individuals in the study of blood-borne viruses. Yet, it is still constrained as a concept because of its near universal focus on couples and transmission risk....

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