Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is the end of AIDS in sight?

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 170 posts

Re: Is the end of AIDS in sight?

#51

Post by foldr »

Simulacra wrote: post #50
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…

IMO Prep has raised the risk of HIV by giving people a false sense of security.

Annual HIV diagnoses have declined (somewhat) in the US in recent years. So either it hasn't, or there are other bigger factors at play.

Re: Is the end of AIDS in sight?

#52

Post by mathewsanders »

> 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 insurance companies must include PrEP as free preventative care, but that doesn't help the most at risk who are young and may not be insured (30-day supply of generic PrEP costs ~$2,500, and every 3 months people must have doctor visit and bloodwork to check HIV and STIs, and for potential liver and kidney damage).

In 2022 a federal judge ruled that they can not require Christian companies to cover PrEP as this violates their religious rights under federal law[1]. This will likely make it's way up to the Supreme Court, and there's a high risk that as a result people in the United States will then need to pay out of pocket for PrEP.

[1] https://www.axios.com/2022/09/07/court-hiv-prep-requirement-...

Re: Is the end of AIDS in sight?

#53

Post by anaisbetts »

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?

Both of those are on the same order as "a bad cold" in terms of health - they are straightforward to treat and are not at all a big deal.

Re: Is the end of AIDS in sight?

#54

Post by bigbillheck »

bugglebeetle wrote: post #43
abeppu wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.”

Trump's covid response had some problems, especially early on, but it was infinitely better than Reagan's AIDS response.

Re: Is the end of AIDS in sight?

#55

Post by einpoklum »

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…

How does the WorldMeters site reach the covid 7M figure? I know that deciding how to attribute deaths to covid is not that trivial (e.g. as opposed to deaths with covid; or people who did not get tested, i.e. unconfirmed deaths etc.)

Re: Is the end of AIDS in sight?

#56

Post by londons_explore »

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?

No - just a guess based on the fact that me and the people around me tend to know ~250 people. Ie. there are probably 250 people who would find out if I got diabetes and died. Those people would then probably take a little more care of their health, and take steps to avoid the same fate.

Re: Is the end of AIDS in sight?

#57

Post by cltby »

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…

Rather depressing that we're subsidizing wanton sexual indulgence to the tune of $30k/year/person.

Re: Is the end of AIDS in sight?

#58

Post by irrational »

anaisbetts wrote: post #53
TZubiri wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Both of those are on the same order as "a bad cold" in terms of health - they are straightforward to treat and are not at all a big deal.

That's not true. Both can cause infertility in women. One of my friends is an ob/gyn and they say that one of the saddest parts of their jobs is telling a couple that the wife is infertile because of an STI she contracted (almost always Chlamydia or Gonorrhea) at some time in the past. Both of these STIs can go undetected in females for years. They just don't have any outward symptoms. By the time they find out, it is too late.

Re: Is the end of AIDS in sight?

#59

Post by toomuchtodo »

foldr wrote: post #49
TZubiri wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aids is definitely the strongest sexually transmitted virus out there. But don't you think that there will always be sexually transmitted diseases associated with promiscuity? Not to say that aids is only transmitted through promiscuity, but superspreading is highly relevant. It is my understanding that gay people have more sex partners than than straight people, so it's likely that these diseases will disproportiona…

>I think that limiting amount of partners is a vital part to combating sexually transmitted diseases It's much more important to have safe sex. Condoms and PrEP work. Every thread on HN about HIV/AIDS seems to attract at least one person who feels obliged to say something about how promiscuous gay people are. I don't think these comments often come from a good place. (For example, you have previously made a rather in…

I was super impressed when I went to see my PCP for my annual physical and when I mentioned I'm non monogamous (which apparently triggers a diagnostic code for "high risk sexual behavior") she said, "We can put you on PrEP if you want, just to be sure. Cheap insurance." Cheap insurance indeed.

Re: Is the end of AIDS in sight?

#60

Post by irrational »

cortesoft wrote: post #36
TZubiri wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Those are both treatable and not permanent.

They are treatable if a person knows they have it, but they often go undetected in women. Women often have no outward symptoms and by the time they are diagnosed, the damage is done and they are infertile. This is permanent damage that is devastating news to couples trying to get pregnant.
Post reply on HN