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A little off topic, but may be beneficial to uppercase all of "Aids" to "AIDS" to avoid ambiguity
To an American audience, yeah, it's definitely better in all caps. However, The Economist is British, and sometimes in British English they capitalize acronyms that way. Only "true" (pronounceable) acronyms, though, so they'll write Nato ("nay toh") and BBC ("bee bee see").
"Is the End of Aids in Sight?" Short answer - no. Even if they achieve their ambitious plan, 5% is still a large number. Look at how hard it has been to eradicate the last of polio, and that has a lifelong vaccine.
It's also a self-balancing system. As HIV becomes rarer, fewer people will be concerned about it, and therefore fewer will bother taking Prep daily. In turn, HIV becomes more infectious, and more people contract it. It will probably stabilize with about 0.4% of humans being infected. Lots of things affect about 0.4% of people, because that's rare enough that most people don't have any friend or colleague affected, an…
A little off topic, but may be beneficial to uppercase all of "Aids" to "AIDS" to avoid ambiguity
To an American audience, yeah, it's definitely better in all caps. However, The Economist is British, and sometimes in British English they capitalize acronyms that way. Only "true" (pronounceable) acronyms, though, so they'll write Nato ("nay toh") and BBC ("bee bee see").
My childhood was filled with warnings and media depicting the tragedy of HIV/AIDS, the surrounding bigotry, and the history of this pandemic still has some cache. COVID, conversely, has all but disappeared from the national stage, despite still actively killing large numbers of people. Pointing this out even now is likely to draw accusals of one being a terrified nut or obsessive. It’s such a drastic change, that it’s hard to reconcile a past where public health and the moral dimensions around our practice of it played such a prominent part in our culture with the disregard and denial of the present.
EDIT:
To clarify, I’m speaking about my experience of both pandemics in the US. Worldwide, AIDS has of course killed more people than COVID.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's also a self-balancing system. As HIV becomes rarer, fewer people will be concerned about it, and therefore fewer will bother taking Prep daily. In turn, HIV becomes more infectious, and more people contract it. It will probably stabilize with about 0.4% of humans being infected. Lots of things affect about 0.4% of people, because that's rare enough that most people don't have any friend or colleague affected, an…
Where did you get that 0.4% number? Is this a well-established statistic?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's also a self-balancing system. As HIV becomes rarer, fewer people will be concerned about it, and therefore fewer will bother taking Prep daily. In turn, HIV becomes more infectious, and more people contract it. It will probably stabilize with about 0.4% of humans being infected. Lots of things affect about 0.4% of people, because that's rare enough that most people don't have any friend or colleague affected, an…
Where did you get that 0.4% number? Is this a well-established statistic?
As an older millennial, it’s interesting to me observe the difference with which HIV/AIDS and COVID has been treated. While untreated HIV infection is more lethal than COVID, COVID has killed more people in the past 4 years than HIV/AIDS did in the past 40+. My childhood was filled with warnings and media depicting the tragedy of HIV/AIDS, the surrounding bigotry, and the history of this pandemic still has some cache…
As an older millennial, it’s interesting to me observe the difference with which HIV/AIDS and COVID has been treated. While untreated HIV infection is more lethal than COVID, COVID has killed more people in the past 4 years than HIV/AIDS did in the past 40+. My childhood was filled with warnings and media depicting the tragedy of HIV/AIDS, the surrounding bigotry, and the history of this pandemic still has some cache…
I've noticed the same thing, and I'm pretty sure it's because COVID no longer features as part of identity politics. It's the identity politics that drove the AIDS discussion, and it's been the identify politics that drove the COVID discussion. Now that has passed, COVID is no longer a topic people care to discuss regularly, while AIDS is still a forefront topic.
It's hard for people who didn't live through it to really understand what a terrifying time the 80s and 90s were. First off, the general message of sexual education was pretty much "If you have sex, it's probably going to kill you." There's some hyperbole there, but not much. There was really no such thing as "sex-positive messaging", and even many years later it took me time to realize how much I had internalized "sex is a bad, dangerous thing". More importantly, though, is that an HIV diagnosis really was seen as a death sentence. If you're in your 20s, imagine a situation where tons of your friends had died, and there was an ever-present fear that you might be next. I honestly believe everyone who lived through that time in that situation has some level of PTSD.
So yes, there is still a lot to do as this article points out, but it is really amazing to see how far we've come. Even a lot of the issues pointed out in the article had less to do with technology and (honestly to my surprise) economic access than with shitty cultural practices (e.g. overall misogyny and men refusing to get tested). It's important to not lose vigilance, but I think it's also important to indulge in a moment of gratitude every now and then to all the warriors (both in the medical and research fields, and the many patients who lost their lives) who have accomplished so much for all of humanity.
As an older millennial, it’s interesting to me observe the difference with which HIV/AIDS and COVID has been treated. While untreated HIV infection is more lethal than COVID, COVID has killed more people in the past 4 years than HIV/AIDS did in the past 40+. My childhood was filled with warnings and media depicting the tragedy of HIV/AIDS, the surrounding bigotry, and the history of this pandemic still has some cache…