161–170 of 325 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
prep is great but i would really rather take a one-time vaccine than be expected to take an expensive pill forever that could mess up my liver
Which one do you suppose the pharmaceutical companies would prefer?
While HIV vaccine research is an exciting field, it's worth pointing out that halting HIV transmission is, practically speaking, a solved problem with oral and injectable reverse transcriptase inhibitors. The ongoing loss of life and health due to HIV could be stopped if we cared enough to invest resources in wide-scale PrEP availability and public health education. Waiting for an HIV vaccine is the domain equivalent…
There are some dubious metaphors in use here. Public health is not about math problems to be “solved.” “A solution exists” is just a milestone. “We just have to use them” - yes, but leave out “just,” there is more to do and it’s hard. The answer to “are more tools really going to help” is always going to be “it depends.” Promising interventions sometimes fail entirely. If they statistically improve outcomes, that’s a…
https://www.tumblr.com/squareallworthy/163790039847/everyone...
I distinctly remember Reagan cabinet members openly joking about all the people dying from it in WhiteHouse press briefing (basically Trump before Trump prototypes)
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_HIV/AIDS
Now if they could just do this for me-cfs/long-covid and related auto-immune diseases (there are over eighty) without the 50 year timeline please
While HIV vaccine research is an exciting field, it's worth pointing out that halting HIV transmission is, practically speaking, a solved problem with oral and injectable reverse transcriptase inhibitors. The ongoing loss of life and health due to HIV could be stopped if we cared enough to invest resources in wide-scale PrEP availability and public health education. Waiting for an HIV vaccine is the domain equivalent…
It's a problem that was "solved" long before that by just wearing a condom and protecting yourself against other diseases too, and even pregnancy. Condoms are cheap, widely available and decades of condom-related education has been given out to many different generation of kids and adults worldwide. Somehow we still need day after pills, abortions, antibiotics and other STD meds, and vaccines, now (hopefully) for HIV…
While HIV vaccine research is an exciting field, it's worth pointing out that halting HIV transmission is, practically speaking, a solved problem with oral and injectable reverse transcriptase inhibitors. The ongoing loss of life and health due to HIV could be stopped if we cared enough to invest resources in wide-scale PrEP availability and public health education. Waiting for an HIV vaccine is the domain equivalent…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is that a huge problem? Doesn’t almost everything else have a prophylactic and is curable? Hep-C might be the only other one I believe and I’m unaware if it’s treatable or not.
Antibiotic resistant syphilis and ghonerrea don't sound like a fun time
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I understand the difference between those statements, but confess that I'm not clear on the important distinction. Are there situations where untreated HIV doesn't progress to AIDS? Is the virus more transmissible in someone with AIDS than someone who's still at the HIV-positive stage? Asking here because I don't know, and I think an answer might help others know, too. (And to clarify, I genuinely don't know, and I'm…
We are unaware of any situations where HIV+ doesn’t turn into AIDS without treatment. But being HIV+ is simply having a virus, not actively dying. HIV+ status also never clears - later tests that are “negative” mean your viral load is undetectable, at which point you can no longer transmit HIV to others. Undetectable = Untransmissable.
* If someone has a negative test after treatment, but that’s not counted as “cured”, does that imply it could (or maybe will) come back if treatment is stopped?
* What’s the importance of the distinction between HIV+ vs AIDS, from a public health or human perspective? We don’t talk about influenza+ vs “has the flu”, at least as far as I know. Does HIV+ carry less stigma than AIDS?
Thanks for your earlier answer. I know this specific infection has lots of difficult history. It’s hard to formulate my questions without sounding suspiciously close to a sea lion or something, but I sincerely want to know. And yes, I could google it but then it wouldn’t be an interesting conversation, or one others could read and learn from.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"The ongoing loss of life and health due to HIV could be stopped if we cared enough to invest resources in wide-scale PrEP availability and public health education." It wouldn't be stopped, only slowed. You would still have transmission from accidental or unknown exposure. You would also have a small portion of the population that didn't care, regardless of the education.
As we all hopefully learnt from COVID-19, slowing sufficiently is the same as stopping. It’s a numbers game. Slowing transmission below some threshold will eventually mean that there are no new transmissions.
While HIV vaccine research is an exciting field, it's worth pointing out that halting HIV transmission is, practically speaking, a solved problem with oral and injectable reverse transcriptase inhibitors. The ongoing loss of life and health due to HIV could be stopped if we cared enough to invest resources in wide-scale PrEP availability and public health education. Waiting for an HIV vaccine is the domain equivalent…
You could say the same about teen pregnancy being a practically solved problem, except there is still the problem of teen pregnancy. Or even something more mundane as driving consistently safely all the time to solve the problem of accidents. If everyone was disciplined all the time in regard to everything, many problems in the world would simply not exist. But we live in reality where for whatever reason, people don…
I fully believe that HIV wouldn’t exist if PrEP had come out in the 80s when public hysteria was at an all-time high and the will to eradicate it was present.