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Is the end of AIDS in sight?

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Re: Is the end of AIDS in sight?

#91

Post by logicchains »

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…

> but much of the developing world doesn't have that, and they are still dying like flies,

Fortunately life expectancies are steadily rising even in the African countries hardest hit by HIV. Eswatini for instance has over 25% of the population HIV positive, but the life expectancy is now up to around 60 years (it was around 40 two decades ago), only 5 years behind Pakistan.

Re: Is the end of AIDS in sight?

#92

Post by RC_ITR »

TZubiri wrote: post #31
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…

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…

Unfortunately you're buying into a lot of propaganda that persists to this day.

Straight sex workers exist. Given straight people outnumber gay people by (let's say) 10:1, there is almost certainly a higher absolute number of straight promiscuous potential superspreaders than there are gay ones.

Even in the middle of the bell curve, nearly 50% of American babies are born to unmarried parents, so it's not like strict monogamy is the norm among straight people [0]

The reason that HIV transmitted so well in gay male populations is because receptive anal sex has a 20x higher likelihood of transmission than receptive vaginal sex and a 40x higher likelihood of transmission vs. insertive sex.[1]

Within the gay community, you have plenty of men who engage in that relatively high risk act of receptive anal sex, who then go on to be the insertive party in another interaction.

Within straight populations, the potential spreaders are just much less likely to contract HIV in the first place.

Sorry to be so specific about something sexual, but I have always found it odd that this very practical information has not been put into the mainstream. I guess it's the imperfect middleground - people who want to shame gay men don't care about the data and people who support gay men don't want to stigmatize receptive anal sex. But unfortunately, I bet it's led to a lot of needlessly risky behaviors.

[0]https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/unmarried/unmarrie... [1] https://stanfordhealthcare.org/medical-conditions/sexual-and....

Re: Is the end of AIDS in sight?

#93

Post by bobsmooth »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #46
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…

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/overview/data-and-trends/stat...

>but it exposes the flaw in this notion that gay people are sluts and sluts get STDs.

Your insecurities don't change the facts. Gay men have more sex and more sex leads to more STDs.

Re: Is the end of AIDS in sight?

#94

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #59
foldr wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

It's really amazing how much that attitude has changed in a decade or so. I asked my PCP at the time (and this was the last time I saw this doctor, FWIW) about PrEP when it was relatively new, and basically got a "I don't want to encourage dangerous behavior" lecture.

Re: Is the end of AIDS in sight?

#96

Post by willmadden »

graeme wrote: post #83
DelaneyM wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> …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…

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 and the actual cause of death wasn't really COVID. The IFR of COVID is less than a bad flu season.

Re: Is the end of AIDS in sight?

#97

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

TZubiri wrote: post #70
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point I try to get across is to separate "promiscuity is inherently bad" from "sex can have serious negative consequences that you should appropriately plan for depending on your risk tolerance." Another way to think of it: it's also highly likely that if you go to a crowded event that there are tons of diseases you can expose yourself to. Pre-COVID, people used to talk about getting "SXSW flu", e.g. with so many…

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.

Re: Is the end of AIDS in sight?

#99

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

irrational wrote: post #60
cortesoft wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Re: Is the end of AIDS in sight?

#100

Post by aaomidi »

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…

The good riddance attitude is so, so disturbing to me. And it’s fucked that we still have that attitude today.
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