Is the end of AIDS in sight?

Post by giantg2 » Tue, Sep 19, 2023, 6:56 PM UTC

binarymax wrote: post #12

londons_explore wrote: post #10

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?

Post by bugglebeetle » Tue, Sep 19, 2023, 6:59 PM UTC

DelaneyM wrote: post #21

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…

> …COVID has killed more people in the past 4 years than HIV/AIDS did in the past 40+. Ok, so that’s wrong by an order of magnitude. AIDS has killed ~85.6 million [64.8 million–113.0 million] people, and it’s plausible that could be a huge undercount. COVID has killed ~7M people, which is also bad but nowhere near “more”. There are also a lot of reasons these aren’t really comparable pandemics, and the responses to t…

Post by DelaneyM » Tue, Sep 19, 2023, 7:00 PM UTC

bugglebeetle wrote: post #18

tristor wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

While this may be true to an extent, it doesn’t address why fighting AIDS outside the context of its impact on the LGBTQ community, e.g. in the developing world, still figures so prominently in American culture and public policy. I expect that the real reason is actually something more sinister, where the politics of the US have devolved to a point where almost everyone will accept the “they deserved it” narrative th…

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Sep 19, 2023, 7:05 PM UTC

pluto_modadic wrote: post #20

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…

because one caused a moral panic, and one needed people to be moral.

Post by bugglebeetle » Tue, Sep 19, 2023, 7:08 PM UTC

DelaneyM wrote: post #26

bugglebeetle wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While this may be true to an extent, it doesn’t address why fighting AIDS outside the context of its impact on the LGBTQ community, e.g. in the developing world, still figures so prominently in American culture and public policy. I expect that the real reason is actually something more sinister, where the politics of the US have devolved to a point where almost everyone will accept the “they deserved it” narrative th…

Or possibly it’s like the hole in the ozone layer, which has also faded from public discourse, because thanks to that huge amount of press and action it’s been largely addressed. You’re basically saying “why is this thing we’re all working so hard to prevent not happening enough to justify prevention?”.