171–180 of 227 posts
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It's disturbing that we are being told to learn to live with the virus when there is such a high risk of contraction.
High risk but most infected have close to no symptoms which is nothing like AIDS which used to be a death sentence.
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Which doesn't really mean that HIV/AIDS is not dangerous, but rather it underscores how much more dangerous CoViD really is. I truly hope we manage a better response than the AIDS crisis, because a similar response to COVID-19 would be incredibly devastating.
I wonder what HIV would have done if it hit before mass adoption of protective equipment for sex. I think it could have brought civilization to it's knees.
That's why it erupted in the gay community first.
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I truly was not trying to offend or trivialize anything: my only point, as best as I can distill it, is that people react irrationally and inappropriately to infectious diseases. And we need to work on that. This is not at all unique to HIV/AIDS, even though people suffering from AIDS have born the brunt of the actual suffering. If we can’t have open, rational discussions about HSV, how can we do the same with HIV? E…
I understand the point you were trying to get across. Many STIs have substantial stigma around them and it makes it harder to fight them. I just want to caution you that making these forms of equivalences is a common tactic to derail and discount the impact of HIV or the experience of populations disproportionately harmed, in the same way that people derail discussions about the disproportionate killing of black peop…
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I did not know that getting HIV required consent, or being naked.
But you get the idea. You could opt out. People did. And it didn't take totally isolating yourself in a clean room. Unless you mean rape or something. But that's a violent crime, and a tiny, tiny fraction of the public health issue that is an infectious disease.
I remember how little was known in the beginning, when it was called GRID. For a while it was theorized in the media that semen hitting the bloodstream was causing the immune system to freak out; my friends, who had just started puberty, asked me (as the designated science nerd) what I thought of that, as they had somewhat random scenarios of nocturnal emissions striking road rash from skateboarding. I thought it unl…
There are still a lot people spreading the misinformation that hetero sex is as risky as anal sex, because they have some odd agenda to push.
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the "gain-of-function" experiments - ie. increasing the deadliness and transmissibility of a virus - doesn't seem to require any meaningful technology, at least not the way it was done in the Wuhan labs to the coronavirus[1]. Such "improved" virus wouldn't look like a "lab made". In theory similar gain-of-function experiments could have resulted in the human transmissible HIV back then. [1] https://www.newsweek.com/d…
Those gain-of-function experiments were done at the University of North Carolina. But we know for certain that SARS-CoV-2 was not created through gain-of-function experiments. It doesn't use any of the standard viral backbones used in such experiments, it has a receptor binding domain that computational chemistry algorithms would not have predicted to work (meaning that nature "invented" it, not scientists), and the…
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> seriously, it’s straight outta the 70s I felt like I was re-hearing a church youth pastor sermon from 1985 reading the parent comment.
If you grew up in the church I did, you could have the pleasure of hearing those comments as recently as ... checks calendar at least 2006! (I left after so who knows if they kept that line of rhetoric going). It’s surprisingly common to hear this stuff today, still.
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> seriously, it’s straight outta the 70s I felt like I was re-hearing a church youth pastor sermon from 1985 reading the parent comment.
Dude, i dont have those views of gayness. How about you go to a spa with your kids and unawares you see a gay orgy. I didnt say a thing because of my kids and because i didnt want to to be the gay hater you’re talking about. But yeah, use that bigot label carelessly and it will mean nothing
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You know how public restrooms in the USA always have paper toilet seat covers? This dates to that era (the product existed already but was extremely uncommon). Because of that whenever I see those I think of the bigoted attitude that lead to their deployment and won't use them.
I respect your commitment to fighting bigotry, but I mean - those toilets can be pretty nasty. May as well use them, now that we have them. :)