Silvia Azaña, an embryologist at inviTRA, tells us in this video if semen washing procedure is effective for patients with HIV:
Yes. Since one of the potential routes for the virus's transmission is through sexual contact, washing semen could significantly lower the risk of passing it on to a partner.
The reason for this is that the motile sperm are isolated from the other components of the semen, including seminal plasma and various cells that could harbor the virus.
Additionally, the absence of the virus is checked in a part of the sample obtained after this processing. In this way, only in the case of a negative result (indicating that there is no virus present in the sample), the other part of the sample may be used in an assisted reproduction treatment, that will generally be ICSI. This way, the possibility of contagion is minimized.
