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Is the end of AIDS in sight?

economist.com

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Re: Is the end of AIDS in sight?

#121

Post by OfSanguineFire »

abeppu wrote: post #33
bugglebeetle wrote: post #14

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…

> 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 ... but for years, the HIV/AIDS crisis _was_ ignored, or even laughed at by critical people in government. When you say your childhood was filled with warnings about the tragedy of HIV/AIDS, I think you must be talking about the early 90s, a decade after t…

> When you say your childhood was filled with warnings about the tragedy of HIV/AIDS, I think you must be talking about the early 90s

I see the GP’s edit that he is indeed from the USA, but I still think it should be emphasized that what you write wasn’t necessary true for HN readers from some other countries. I just watched Agnès Varda’s film Kung-Fu Master, which was made in 1986 and incorporates some documentary aspects: it shows UK television already replete with coverage of HIV-AIDS and how to have safe sex, and AIDS-prevention activists addressing passersby on the streets of Paris. Fear of AIDS was a mere sideshow in the film’s plot, but this all gave the film considerable value as an insight into that era.

Re: Is the end of AIDS in sight?

#122

Post by bugglebeetle »

abeppu wrote: post #61
bugglebeetle wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While this is correct, my point was that the experience of the HIV/AIDS seemingly had no impact on our handling of COVID. But Reagan/AIDS, Trump/COVID, is a pretty bleak manifestation of “first as tragedy, then as a farce.”

I guess, how did you want the HIV/AIDS experience to inform the COVID response? I don't want to defend Trump and his bleach-injection suggestions etc, but we did: - develop vaccines at a really rapid pace (it's too bad they aren't more effective) - learn a lot about how to treat COVID - shut down broad categories of activity which would have contributed to spread - gave everyone free vaccines and tests (I think this…

> But if slowing down HIV/AIDS transmission had required that most people inconvenience themselves, or behave differently for even a week, I think the story would have been very different.

Here, I would ask you to compare changes in behavior around condom usage to the near blanket rejection of wearing a mask in healthcare settings. Irrationality and denialism has fully won out, despite the former being a more intrusive constraint on one’s behavior.

Re: Is the end of AIDS in sight?

#123

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

Obscurity4340 wrote: post #118
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…

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

The article mentions that women are afraid to take prophylactic treatments, because their husbands/boyfriends will take umbrage. It's not uncommon for men to have multiple sexual partners, and transmission is often accomplished that way.

There's also a fairly pervasive problem with sexual violence. Women tend to bear a lot of the pain.

Re: Is the end of AIDS in sight?

#124

Post by AlgorithmicTime »

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…

[dead]

Re: Is the end of AIDS in sight?

#125

Post by Clamchop »

chimeracoder wrote: post #85
mathewsanders wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I don't fully understand U.S. healthcare system (I'm an immigrant from a country with universal healthcare, and this is the first time in my life that I've had a medication prescribed other than short-term antibiotics). I pay a $10 co-pay for generic with my insurance, but when I pick up from pharmacy the receipt says "you insurance saved you $1888" (you're right it's not ~$2500/month - I just checked and tha…

> I guess I don't fully understand U.S. healthcare system Yes, it's confusing. > I pay a $10 co-pay for generic with my insurance, but when I pick up from pharmacy the receipt says "you insurance saved you $1888" (you're right it's not ~$2500/month - I just checked and that's a different prescription I have that I get filled at the same time). As a rule, the "your insurance saved you $X" is a meaningless statement. I…

I'm completely of the mind that it should be banned. With recent (though deeply flawed) efforts toward transparency in pricing, we might even see it some day!

Re: Is the end of AIDS in sight?

#126

Post by mock-possum »

Is there any doubt?

I mean I get a bottle of pills mailed to me every quarter, i don’t have insurance at the moment and Costco only charges me like $100 for that supply - and all I have to do is pop one Truvada a day, and I’m practically immune to AIDS.

How could AIDS hope to persist with that kind of treatment so readily available? (Other than in poverty and mental illness, where all kinds of things stick around because people don’t have the wherewithal to undertake treatment obviously)

Re: Is the end of AIDS in sight?

#127

Post by yieldcrv »

mathewsanders wrote: post #52

> They can take pre-exposure prophylaxis (prep), a kind of drug that reduces their chance of contracting it by 99% or so. This comes as a daily pill, and is popular among gay men in rich countries. The article takes a global focus (which makes sense since most new HIV diagnoses happen outside of the United States), but even the United States has over 30,000 new HIV infections per year. In 2021 feds mandated that insu…

For a rich person by global standards, HIV is a solved problem in the US right?

PreP for people trying to inhibit both progression and transmission of HIV and PeP for those that don't have it

The article talked about a new 3 month lasting version of PeP as well

when we’re not talking about uninsured and poor people, this is done now, right?

cishet men dont have anything near the vulnerability surface as other populations, if I’m understanding correctly. just test and move on or react accordingly. anybody that was subject to the traumatic sex-scare education of the 80s to early 2000s should just get updated education.

Re: Is the end of AIDS in sight?

#128

Post by willmadden »

graeme wrote: post #120
willmadden wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

>But you need another explanation.

Oh, I have the explanation, and stacks of studies to back it up, but I'll be banned and downvoted for explaining it here. Have a nice day.

Re: Is the end of AIDS in sight?

#129

Post by imagainstit »

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…

"The vast majority of new infections are through gay men having sex. IV drug use only accounts for 7% of new infections"

In the US.

The vast majority of infections (90%) in Africa are from heterosexual sex:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12665438/#:~:text=Abstract,a....

The primary driver of the enormous epidemic ongoing in Russia is by far IV drug users (and heterosexual sex):

https://www.politico.eu/article/everything-you-wanted-to-kno...

"Although needle-sharing among drug addicts was one of the main reasons the disease spread so quickly, most HIV transmissions in Russia — 57 percent — are now a result of heterosexual sex. Drug use is responsible for 40 percent, while gay sex accounts for around 3 percent, according to Russia’s Federal Research Center for AIDS Prevention and Control in Moscow."

The majority of people living with HIV worldwide are straight women (52%):

https://www.unwomen.org/en/what-we-do/hiv-and-aids/facts-and....

I agree with you that the claim from some people to make like sex and number of sexual partners has nothing to do with STDs is ridiculous. It annoys me a great deal.

Gay men are disproportionately at risk and affected due to number of partners and type of sex. But most people with AIDS are straight.

Anyway your LGB link is funny because it claims (I think out of confusion) that lesbians have more partners as well. But lesbians also have the lowest std rates of any group. Making them obviously the best and most morally superior of the orientations.

Re: Is the end of AIDS in sight?

#130

Post by pyuser583 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #107
irrational wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think there are plenty of problems with US healthcare, but I don't think this is one of them. Standard of care in the US is to get screened for STDs at least annually for sexually active people, and more frequently depending on your risk factors. Being on PrEP involves mandatory testing for STDs every 3 months. There are also tons of free clinics where people can get checked for STDs.

Yeah I always remind my wife about that but she says she doesn’t like needles and it’s not necessary.

Oh well.

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