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Is the end of AIDS in sight?

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Re: Is the end of AIDS in sight?

#111

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #104
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have spent my adult life in a community that experiences higher-than-average HIV/HepC exposure, and well remember the "Great Die-Off" of the early-to-mid 1990s. To anyone that missed out, dying of AIDs is horrible. The West has the luxury of expensive drugs to treat it, but much of the developing world doesn't have that, and they are still dying like flies, with very little of the transmission happening through hom…

> The West has the luxury of expensive drugs to treat it, but much of the developing world doesn't have that, and they are still dying like flies That's not really true, as the article points out. PEPFAR has really done amazing work lowering the HIV mortality rate in developing countries. And a reminder of who may keep this program from being reauthorized: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2023/07/29/pepfar-aids.…

Glad to hear that.

Most of Africa is still a pretty terrible place to be gay, though.

Re: Is the end of AIDS in sight?

#112

Post by dekhn »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #19

As a gay man well into middle age, whenever I get somewhat depressed about the state of human affairs, I think about the incredible improvements in AIDS treatment and prevention and I feel a little better. 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 g…

Thanks for sharing this. One of my major motivations when I was in high school- around the time that AIDS was starting to grow rapidly, was to go into drug discovery to find medicines that could cure HIV infection/reduce the impact of AIDS on patients.

At the time (about 5-6 years later) we were working on reverse transcriptase inhibitors, which I think eventually turned out to work pretty well as an early treatment. But boy, was the process slow... decades of basic and applied biology... to get where we are today.

It's so painful to watch COVID vax deniers today because it's hard enough to stay motivated over long periods of time... but when people just sort of crap all over the important scientific and medical work to get to where we are, it reminds me of some of the aggressive groups, such as Act Up SF (which actively fought against the establishment, including Fauci, who was a critical ally to HIV-infected patients at the time): https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/31/opinion/anthony-fauci-hiv...

Re: Is the end of AIDS in sight?

#113

Post by dekhn »

TZubiri wrote: post #32
at_a_remove wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often mention the whole Gen X trauma thing. Part of it is literally seeing the ladder being pulled up just as we reached for it. Not just for jobs or college tuition, but also sexually -- the previous generation had a pretty good time and the worst that was on offer was herpes. Puberty starts rumbling around and we're wondering what the future looks like and suddenly "GRID." And we were flailing around, is it viral…

herpes is the worst thing? What about chlamydia, gonorrhea?

Well, in the sense that as a retrovirus that integrates into your genome and then erupts unexpectedly decades later.... yes.

Re: Is the end of AIDS in sight?

#114

Post by ProfessorLayton »

hellojesus wrote: post #106
diogenes4 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't help that heterosexual use of prep is virtually unheard of.

I hear of it, but typically it's only taken by those who engage in high risk activities. There are potential issues with the liver and kidney that make it not worthwhile if one isn't at moderate to high risk.

More than 1/5 of HIV transmissions are heterosexual in the US. Additionally, prep requires quarterly testing to monitor any potential issues you mentioned (Which are pretty rare), and they also run an STD panel.

Just having a quarterly panel would be a huge boon to anyone with more than one partner. Normalizing prep for anyone who thinks they might need it would be a major step forward.

Re: Is the end of AIDS in sight?

#115

Post by fragmede »

irrational wrote: post #101
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is precisely why people should get regularly tested for STDs.

Except, we all know that doesn't happen, mostly because of the state of healthcare in the USA. My brother got colon cancer, so I tried to get a colonoscopy (I'm over 50), they refused unless I saw a primary care doctor first, well the first available appointment was 6 months out. After that I got a colonoscopy appointment, another 6 months out. Ridiculous reality.

One Medical makes it easy to get tested for STDs; it's not a colonoscopy, which is a specialist procedure. Looking at my app, the next available appointment with my PCP is two days away, at which point she'll put in a lab order. I go down the hall, they draw blood, and I give them a urine sample, and a few days later I get a pdf of results in the app.

Not just for my own peace of mind, but potential partners have asked to see it in the past. Different cultures I guess. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: Is the end of AIDS in sight?

#116

Post by hellojesus »

ProfessorLayton wrote: post #114
hellojesus wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear of it, but typically it's only taken by those who engage in high risk activities. There are potential issues with the liver and kidney that make it not worthwhile if one isn't at moderate to high risk.

More than 1/5 of HIV transmissions are heterosexual in the US. Additionally, prep requires quarterly testing to monitor any potential issues you mentioned (Which are pretty rare), and they also run an STD panel. Just having a quarterly panel would be a huge boon to anyone with more than one partner. Normalizing prep for anyone who thinks they might need it would be a major step forward.

Yes, I don't disagree. It's just that most of the people that I know that have multiple partners are only on prep if those partners are seeing untested other folks.

Said differently, those I know on prep are taking it because they cannot account for the extent of the sexual network of their partners. Those that aren't on prep have multiple partners, but they all test and have complete information on the status of everyone involved in the sexual network graph.

I see it as a good choice if you cannot attest for accurate, recent results of every possible connection in your sexual network.

Re: Is the end of AIDS in sight?

#117

Post by fragmede »

bobsmooth wrote: post #93
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Promiscuity does not propagate sexually transmitted diseases. You are working off of a false stereotype which has limited the capacity of your rational thought, and as a result, you imagine a world which does not exist, and propose solutions which will not work. This is a common problem with HN people. They come up with this one idea that kind-of makes sense, and then stop thinking, and shape their whole thought proc…

>Gay people do not have more sex partners than straight people. On average, gay men will have more sexual partners than straight men. There's no reason to deny this. https://www.psypost.org/2020/07/lgb-people-and-extraverts-te... >transmit HIV by sharing needles The vast majority of new infections are through gay men having sex. IV drug use only accounts for 7% of new infections https://www.hiv.gov/hiv-basics/overvie…

In particular though, anal sex has a higher chance of passing on specific STDs. Gay women have a statistically lower (but not zero) chance of passing on STDs.

https://stanfordhealthcare.org/medical-conditions/sexual-and...

Re: Is the end of AIDS in sight?

#118

Post by Obscurity4340 »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #66
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #19

As a gay man well into middle age, whenever I get somewhat depressed about the state of human affairs, I think about the incredible improvements in AIDS treatment and prevention and I feel a little better. 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 g…

I have spent my adult life in a community that experiences higher-than-average HIV/HepC exposure, and well remember the "Great Die-Off" of the early-to-mid 1990s. To anyone that missed out, dying of AIDs is horrible. The West has the luxury of expensive drugs to treat it, but much of the developing world doesn't have that, and they are still dying like flies, with very little of the transmission happening through hom…

How does it relate to misogyny if you don't mind me asking?

Re: Is the end of AIDS in sight?

#119

Post by elzbardico »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #97
TZubiri wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding concert going, I've certainly met people so risk averse that they don't join a concert mass outdoors, and a lot more that don't do so indoors. This is especially more common before important events like a trip. That said, the respiratory route is very distinct from the oral, genital and anal route. On a spectrum of frequency of contact, respiratory is the most frequent, then comes oral/digestive, then genit…

> but my guess is that it would never spread there because there's more protection mechanisms, respiratory is like a process running unprivileged on an open port 80. Genital is port 22 and anal-genital is rdp or teamviewer with admin privileges on a server. Dude, considering we're not even done yet with a worldwide pandemic caused by a deadly respiratory virus, I'd probably stop with the bad analogies.

Covid is not remarkably deadly. How long will people insist it is? Don’t they teach history in the US?

Re: Is the end of AIDS in sight?

#120

Post by graeme »

willmadden wrote: post #96
graeme wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As abeppu points out, this is their death estimate: 40.4 million [32.9 million–51.3 million] is their estimate on deaths. Further, covid deaths are severely undercounted. Our world in data reports 26 million excess deaths to date, about 5 million in the past year. That's with three years of data, vs. three decades for HIV. There's surely some HIV undercount too, but it's a reasonable bet that covid will exceed HIV in…

>Further, covid deaths are severely undercounted. No, they are severely overcounted. We were literally counting people who died of motorcycle accidents as COVID deaths if they tested positive for COVID in the emergency room. The PCR tests were dialed up to 40 cycles, which caused a huge amount of "false positives" as well. The health authorities admitted that over 90% of the COVID deaths had pre-existing conditions a…

What I cited are excess deaths rather than Covid deaths. No one labelled them. The baseline death rate went up after Covid arrived.

You can argue they weren’t Covid. But you need another explanation. And it needs to be global; this happened in every country.

The rise in deaths began with Covid, and continues now. The baseline death rate has shifted higher.

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