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900 Children Test Positive for H.I.V. in Pakistani city of Ratodero

nytimes.com

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Re: 900 Children Test Positive for H.I.V. in Pakistani city of Ratodero

#71

Post by pvaldes »

ars wrote: post #50
scarmig wrote: post #29

What's (not) shocking is how stigmatized the HIV-positive population is. Authorities are literally segregating the HIV-positive children into a different side of the room from the rest. An obvious effect of this is that people will be terrified to get tested at all, as it's all downside with the possible upside of treatment being a distant dream. And that makes it both harder to evaluate the spread of the disease, an…

Quarantining infected people who have an incurable disease is not really that illogical when you have no medication capable of treating them. Can you imagine if the US had done mandatory testing and quarantine all those years ago? Obviously many people would have had their rights violated to do that, but it might have stopped the disease a long time ago. Voluntary self-quarantine clearly doesn't work. > will be terri…

> Quarantining infected people who have an incurable disease is not really that illogical

This. We choose to do things different in the past and hide the disease. In retrospective it was a terrible mistake IMHO.

The lets call it "human rights" way focused into preserving the rights of 10.000 or 100.000 people in the 80's. This proven to be a "genocide-level" idea for Africa (and other third world countries) that toke the lifes of 35 millions of people and helped to spread the disease from 100.000 to 75 millions. Currently there are 37 millions of people alive positive for the virus, and increasing.

We could instead to have choosed the, I will call it, "fascist way". Being ruthless about forcing the diagnostised carriers to be transparent about the condition. Having zero tolerance specially to the people caught infecting deliberately other people again and again. This would made the life more difficult for many innocent people, but the new cases would had stopped suddenly overnight. The VIH would have been solved in a decade saving millions of lives past and future.

The problem was that only the first way assured the future bussiness for the companies investing lots of money for developping the cure, so there was (more than probably) a strong marketing machine to teach us that any other option is taboo and evil.

Is a huge price that we had paid for the goodism. Maybe we should start refusing to keep paying it and do something. AIDS was a "once in life" event, a disease jumping between species by mistake in 1940, and there is not any logic reason to not point all our weapons into removing it from humans once and for good.

Re: 900 Children Test Positive for H.I.V. in Pakistani city of Ratodero

#72

Post by aaron695 »

andrewstuart wrote: post #6
fouc wrote: post #5

>Health officials now say that Mr. Ghanghro is unlikely to be the sole cause of the outbreak. Visiting health workers saw many cases of doctors reusing syringes and I.V. needles. Barbers take the same razor to the faces of multiple customers, they said, and roadside dentists crack away at patients’ teeth on sidewalks with unsterilized tools.

Even here in Melbourne the barber offers to use a cutthroat razor to give the neck a clean shave after a haircut. He's always a little puzzled when I'm "no thanks" to the razor.

I always get a cut throat when in the 3rd world.

So far they have always put on a new razor without asking.

10 cents for a blade. I'm sure in Melbourne they can afford it.

At their wages reusing duller blades would cost them more in lost time.

There's also no evidence anyone has gotten HIV from a razor or it's really possible.

Re: 900 Children Test Positive for H.I.V. in Pakistani city of Ratodero

#73

Post by technion »

solstice wrote: post #13
andrewstuart wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even here in Melbourne the barber offers to use a cutthroat razor to give the neck a clean shave after a haircut. He's always a little puzzled when I'm "no thanks" to the razor.

Woah, I never thought about this possibility.

I can't speak for their situation but the standard here is that when a barber holds up something that looks like a cut throat razor, it's a "shavette", which actually takes a disposable blade.

Re: 900 Children Test Positive for H.I.V. in Pakistani city of Ratodero

#74

Post by 9HZZRfNlpR »

technion wrote: post #73
solstice wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Woah, I never thought about this possibility.

I can't speak for their situation but the standard here is that when a barber holds up something that looks like a cut throat razor, it's a "shavette", which actually takes a disposable blade.

Same here, and I live in a poor country. First he sticks the metal tool into some liquid, to sterilize it, then opens new disposable blade in front of you and installs it to machine.

Re: 900 Children Test Positive for H.I.V. in Pakistani city of Ratodero

#75

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

throwaway8941 wrote: post #26
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still for the life of me can't understand how anyone with any medical training at all could reuse a syringe. Some other shortcuts I could imagine, but reusing a syringe is like eventually guaranteeing this kind of outbreak.

Because you don't know what real poverty is like (neither do I)? I remember a story from one of Atul Gawande's books (was it Complications?) about how rural Indian surgeons operate. As he described it, they were missing many kinds of equipment that western surgeons consider absolutely indispensable in doing their work. They replaced it with whatever was available, stuff like plastic piping from the nearest plumbing s…

The point is if you are in real poverty, doing nothing is cheaper and healthier than reusing a syringe.

Re: 900 Children Test Positive for H.I.V. in Pakistani city of Ratodero

#76

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

oefrha wrote: post #61
tomc1985 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I've never understood about the "you don't know poverty" argument... sure they may not have equipment but there are basic best practices that cost little more than time Perhaps there are more people that would prefer to watch the world burn than we think

Poverty also correlates with lack of education, so there’s also that. I heard (without any verification) that until recently a large percentage of rural population in India find nothing wrong in drinking from and shitting in the same river (let’s put aside technicalities like upstream/downstream).

Surely the doctors have some education, though.

Re: 900 Children Test Positive for H.I.V. in Pakistani city of Ratodero

#77

Post by zbentley »

throwaway8941 wrote: post #26
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still for the life of me can't understand how anyone with any medical training at all could reuse a syringe. Some other shortcuts I could imagine, but reusing a syringe is like eventually guaranteeing this kind of outbreak.

Because you don't know what real poverty is like (neither do I)? I remember a story from one of Atul Gawande's books (was it Complications?) about how rural Indian surgeons operate. As he described it, they were missing many kinds of equipment that western surgeons consider absolutely indispensable in doing their work. They replaced it with whatever was available, stuff like plastic piping from the nearest plumbing s…

That was in the book "Better". They found surgical tubing at a nearby market (not a plumbing store, presumably some sort of medical resale), and sterilized it with a steam autoclave before implanting it in a patient suffering from ... some form of meningitis, I believe?

Re: 900 Children Test Positive for H.I.V. in Pakistani city of Ratodero

#78

Post by nickthemagicman »

pcardoso wrote: post #17

Dreadful. I wonder how this could be avoided. A single individual from a developed country could help pay for some as basic as discardable syringes for a whole town.

Are they educated enough to understand why to use them?

Re: 900 Children Test Positive for H.I.V. in Pakistani city of Ratodero

#79

Post by apta »

dfasdfasd wrote: post #56
ars wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quarantining infected people who have an incurable disease is not really that illogical when you have no medication capable of treating them. Can you imagine if the US had done mandatory testing and quarantine all those years ago? Obviously many people would have had their rights violated to do that, but it might have stopped the disease a long time ago. Voluntary self-quarantine clearly doesn't work. > will be terri…

Yikessss the 1980's US government quarantining a huge percentage of the gay community... That ain't it. HIV is not easy to communicate to other people. Education and PrEP have reduced the problem immensely.

HIV is much more prominent in homosexual men, not sure what your point is.

Re: 900 Children Test Positive for H.I.V. in Pakistani city of Ratodero

#80

Post by nexuist »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #64
oefrha wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree with your general sentiment, you do realize that “the poor in the US” and the poor in Pakistan are orders of magnitude apart, don’t you?

Yes. So are the rich in the two countries and the US is very prone to designing a world that only works for the upper classes. If money alone were all that mattered, you would think a country like the US wouldn't have thousands of homeless, etc.

Money is not what matters and hasn't mattered for a long time. What matters is access to capital, governed by statistics such as credit score, which itself is affected by your mental faculty and ability to hold down a job (i.e. follow instructions, assuming you have job opportunities which are abundant in any U.S. city compared to the third world).

>According to a 2015 assessment by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 564,708 people were homeless on a given night in the United States. At a minimum, 140,000 or 25 percent of these people were seriously mentally ill, and 250,000 or 45 percent had any mental illness.[1]

The homeless problem is a mental health problem. Sure, people can fall into hardship and get e.g. their houses foreclosed on and go bankrupt - but those same people generally are back on their feet a year or two later. Basically everyone who does not suffer from severe mental illness has the capability to raise enough capital on a monthly basis to put a roof over their heads. Now, they may have to work hard, and perhaps unreasonably hard in a sadly large amount of cases, but they can still do it and still do do it given that 99% of the country is not homeless.

[1] https://www.bbrfoundation.org/blog/homelessness-and-mental-i...

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