The AIDS epidemic: Beginning of the end?

[natina]

The AIDS epidemic: Beginning of the end?

WASHINGTON – Thirty-one years after doctors saw their first cases of AIDS, scientists say they now have the knowledge to begin to end the epidemic.


By Doug Kapustin, for USA TODAY
Kevin Swinton, 36, of Silver Spring, Md., tested positive for HIV in February. On July 17, he visits the Whitman-Walker Health Clinic in Washington, D.C., and talks with Chief Medical Officer Raymond C. Martins.


The only questions, says AIDS researcher Diane Havlir, are "Do we have the will to do it?" and "Who is going to pay for it?"
Doctors can now prescribe drug cocktails that reduce the amount of AIDS virus in a patients' body to undetectable levels. Landmark research funded by the National Institutes of Health show that these patients are not only healthier, but virtually non-contagious.

Outside the controlled environment of the lab, however, fighting HIV (http://content.usatoday.com/topics/topic/Health+and+Wellness/Diseases/HIV) is far more complicated.
Only about one in four Americans with HIV have their virus this well controlled, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The rest either aren't getting care, aren't getting consistent care, or don't know they're infected.
"It's very easy to treat HIV, the virus itself," says John Lennox, chief of infectious diseases at Atlanta's Grady Memorial Hospital and a professor at the Emory School of Medicine. "It's very hard to get treatment to people with HIV."
More than 25,000 AIDS researchers, patients and activists will converge on Washington, D.C. (http://content.usatoday.com/topics/topic/D.C), next week for AIDS 2012, an international conference being held in the USA (http://content.usatoday.com/topics/topic/Places,+Geography/Countries/United+States) for the first time in 22 years. While the meeting's location in the nation's capital will highlight the USA's scientific achievements and generosity in fighting AIDS around the world, the conference will also shine a spotlight on the country's uneven progress in treating the disease at home, activists say.
READ MORE;
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/story/2012-08-22/aids-in-america/56282918/1?csp=24&kjnd=uIggFVSOxKRDD4vAvVRDq62qa9tWntSUCiawCCxet5o1j 4QB8V2rpAWI4hQShb9U-36b2f406-565c-4c11-b237-e5681126132e_VeaSqUIEy4r3Tjs2k3gxGv7SunaUNcfF7Pgb1 HPb4VCgy9zBLsp1qfECIYhsYtDh

[danthepoetman]

Good news. Interesting stuff, natina. I wander if they still have in mind this vaccine they were talking about for a while. It would obviously be the best way to stop the spreading of the disease. They were saying at one point that it was close from happening. Where is it at now ?

[Prospero]

From what I heard on the radio news today the new medication will diminish - but not wholly eradicate - the risk of an HIV positive person infecting another. The wisdom is still that the use of condoms will remain crucial in preventing infection. A step forward for sure but hardly the end of AIDS.

[Fancy fancy]

A full cure to HIV/AIDS is literally ten's, if not hundreds of years away, and more importantly, hundreds of billions + away - the difficulty I believe is that once you come up with a treatment that has undergone rigorous testing, the virus has already mutated millions of times.

I think the real risk at present is people forgetting to play safe. There is a rise in barebacking, pig breeding & shitting (have i got this right? ha), porn stars are always at it with the whole thing sanitised via the "rigorous" STD testing they undertake...... does this subconsciously influence public folk amongst many other factors?

[Quiet Reflections]

A full cure to HIV/AIDS is literally ten's, if not hundreds of years away, and more importantly, hundreds of billions + away - the difficulty I believe is that once you come up with a treatment that has undergone rigorous testing, the virus has already mutated millions of times.

I think the real risk at present is people forgetting to play safe. There is a rise in barebacking, pig breeding & shitting (have i got this right? ha), porn stars are always at it with the whole thing sanitised via the "rigorous" STD testing they undertake......
What the fuck is pig breeding and shitting? actual shit? is that on the rise? seriously I want to know if it is because that is fucking gross.

[Fancy fancy]

Yep, afraid so, word on the street is that it started in Hampstead, and Boy George has got something to do with it


What the fuck is pig breeding and shitting? actual shit? is that on the rise? seriously I want to know if it is because that is fucking gross.

[Prospero]

Unhelpful Fancy fancy - what are you talking about? Pig breeding and shitting?

[Quiet Reflections]

Yep, afraid so, word on the street is that it started in Hampstead, and Boy George has got something to do with it
So people shitting on each other is on the rise....ok, cool. But by pig breeding i'm sure you can't possibly mean impregnating swine....right?

[Quiet Reflections]

google isn't helping. I just want bacon now

[Fancy fancy]

Ok, slightly wrong with the phrase but you get my drift; better medication is available + some people take greater risk, some seem to get a thrill out of it which i do not understand:
***********************************************

A study of a homosexual subculture will provoke debate from all quarters, discovers Ken Plummer

Gay barebacking culture, where men have unprotected anal sex, developed in the mid-1990s amid a flurry of controversy. Some claimed it was "tantamount to murder": gay men were making "death camps for themselves". Scarcely a decade after gay men had invented "safer sex", now they were returning to latex-free risk. So, in an age massively immiserated by Aids, a new culture was deliberately organised around unsafe, no-holds-barred sex.

Tim Dean, a professor of literature at a New York University, is our expert guide. Although he is no anthropological ethnographer, he certainly gets under the skin of the culture; he is himself a practitioner of the art. Wanting his study to be ethical, dispassionate and against demonising, he claims neither defence nor critique. For him, there is no one best way for having consensual sex, and this subculture needs to be understood in its own terms.

Drenched with sexual meaning, barebacking brings a new erotic reality. The virus becomes a focus of the sex, the men become "bug chasers" who want the HIV in their bodies, and a "breeding culture" centred on viral exchange is created. In this world, gay men make HIV infection central to their meaning - they are driven by the bug, even want it, giving "no limits" to their range of multiple-pleasured ejaculations. Sex takes on the meanings of an abundance of hyper-masculinity. Gay men here are certainly not sissies: they are more men than men. This is real sex and real danger. It is also an overdetermined culture with so many varied reasons for existing, and Dean devotes a chapter to examining them.

His evidence comes from three main sources: online web cruising; the documentary realism of barebacking porn; and close observations. The focus is San Francisco: that home of one of the earliest scenes of Aids tragedies. It was here that I left my own heart in a joyfully sexual world in the mid-1970s only to return in 1985 to find the bars closed in a land of the dying. Here, Dean moves close up to create a sense of the sexual excitement of these worlds through the realist porn spawned by the culture - Pigs at the Troff (by Dick Wadd Productions), Fucking Crazy and Breed Me (which apparently starts with a three-minute scene of anal ejaculation from the sperm of multiple donors). Here the language and culture - of pigs, of no limits, of "breeding" - suggests a documentary realism that is reworking pornographic conventions. There is an intriguing account of how new forms of sexualities may be generated and how new fetishes develop (some men, it seems, now have a fetish for urine that specifically has the taste of an HIV medication).

This is a serious and intelligent study that aims to provoke, challenge, anger and stimulate debate. It certainly did all these things to me. Indeed, this book will infuriate many who work in the field of HIV prevention and who know the incidence of HIV infection among gay men has recently shot up in many cities. It is also a book to irritate and exasperate those multitudes of lesbian and gay men who will see this as yet another unnecessary exposure, even betrayal, of one sliver of their less savoury and minority side. And while the book will shock homophobes, they will nevertheless find here a wonderful source for their continuing, hateful attack on gay life.

There is much to fascinate and learn from this insider's account of an outsider's culture. But I longed to learn more about the men: what did they do when away from their sex scene, and do many die? I longed too for a sustained ethical debate of issues including rights, responsibilities, citizenships and care - all of which are widely debated in the broader lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender academic community, but are dismissed here. Dean's own ethical claims - puffed up in psychoanalytic language - suggest a viral exchange with the potential for a highly ethical culture built out of a new bond of kinship created through extreme sex. The virus becomes a symbolic bond, providing an "opportunity for opening to the other" and "reactivating the scene of primal seduction". The risks of such intimacy, apparently, are "more profound than the risks of disease". And in this, the author claims, lies its value. But for this reader at least, the dangerous but consensual sex in the book is less problematic than the curious ethical claims Dean makes for it.

[Quiet Reflections]

oh...ok...bug chasers. That term I know. I still want some bacon

[Prospero]

Eat the bacon - and you've had your chips....?

[Quiet Reflections]

bacon and salad no chips. then I have to go workout in about an hour.

[danthepoetman]

Ok, slightly wrong with the phrase but you get my drift; better medication is available + some people take greater risk, some seem to get a thrill out of it which i do not understand:


Fancy fancy, you’re right, I’ve heard about that recently too. HIV positive people live long lives nowadays on medication. That’s why we see that hiv culture emerging. And it’s so human… It’s weird but true. That’s why I was saying that the only real way to overcome the epidemic was a vaccine. And a quick look on the net after googling has just confirmed me that they are still searching and that they still seem to be thinking they’re not too far from the goal… I don’t know…

[Prospero]

Indeed - a "fuller life' can be lived on the medications. But it seems they have side effects and your life expectancy is still shorter as a result.

[danthepoetman]

They won’t be able to cure the disease, of course. The only real hope is to contain it with vaccination campaigns, exactly what they did for smallpox, for instance.

[LibertyHarkness]

you can live fully into your 80s with hiv if your healthy and have the right medications .... the other problems arise in insurances, how people outside see you once your HIV + etc ...

But its no differemnt than having cancer with treatm,ent, no different than having MS and having treatments .. all these have adverse affects ...

YOu cant live your life in a plastic bubble and protect yourself from the world ..for me i i am one of "those porn models" that enjoys and does alot of bareback videos ...sure we have tests ,work with tested models etc ... but we all know its not a failsafe and the test is really not worth the paper its wrote on ... its about working with people you know history about, have testing track records etc ....

For me its a controlled risk i accept the possibilites, but then i accept the possibilite that i can crash when i get in my car each day etc ..

Another note about a cure .. do you really think the CDC and Pharmo companies will release a cure / vacine immediately upon one be ready lolz .. they have to much money to make at moment on people treating their condiitions rather than eradication of them at present ...

[Prospero]

Liberty wrote: "Another note about a cure .. do you really think the CDC and Pharmo companies will release a cure / vacine immediately upon one be ready lolz .. they have to much money to make at moment on people treating their condiitions rather than eradication of them at present ..."

A good point Ms Harkness. Your cynicism matches mine on this.
__________________

[LibertyHarkness]

its just a fact .. where money is to be made money will be made, its human nature unfortunately, much like its human nature to fuck bareback, human nature to fight each other .....

[Quiet Reflections]

I will stick with condoms and monogamy. you won't ever see me in a line for an HIV/AIDS vaccine unless I know exactly how it was made.

[LibertyHarkness]

maybe they will test it on pigs mwuahahahah

[Prospero]

A thought has occasionally occured to me. I wonder how many of the girls who post here and the guys are actually HIV positive and know their status and yet carry on working/playing.

Guys - would you see a girl who you knew to be HIV positive providing you played safe?

And girls if you knew a potential client was HIV positive would you still have sex - including oral - with him? Do any men contact you and say they are positive?

[danthepoetman]

its just a fact .. where money is to be made money will be made, its human nature unfortunately, much like its human nature to fuck bareback, human nature to fight each other .....

They did for other diseases. They will indeed make sure to squeeze tons of dough out of this. But my hunch is, it will be through government help in the western world, and therefore through our pockets with such mediation… We will pay one way or the other and they will make their bread every bit as much.

Good questions, Prospero. Not much chances to get answers though…

[Quiet Reflections]

maybe they will test it on pigs mwuahahahah
Don't fuck with my bacon! It would be tested on rats,monkeys,possibly sharks and africans before we ever see it. in that order

[LibertyHarkness]

why shouldnt you keep on working/playing if your hiv positve ? if your honest about your status upfront and protect yourself/others accordingly then i see no problem with it ...

I hav been asked this before would i still do porn if i was hiv .. i say yes i would , would just mean a change on how you work with people, and the people you work with ..i.e more solo stuff and working with other HIV performers i guess ..

As for escorting i view all clients as being hiv ..

[danthepoetman]

why shouldnt you keep on working/playing if your hiv positve ? if your honest about your status upfront and protect yourself/others accordingly then i see no problem with it ...

I hav been asked this before would i still do porn if i was hiv .. i say yes i would , would just mean a change on how you work with people, and the people you work with ..i.e more solo stuff and working with other HIV performers i guess ..

As for escorting i view all clients as being hiv ..

Understandably. But would other performers still work with you, Libby. Do you know of such cases (without naming anyone) ?

[Prospero]

Well since I asked "good questions" my response would be.

if I knew I was positive i would continue to play - but only in 100 per cent safety (ie i already ensure no anal is bareback either way - but would also make sure the girls didn't suck me bareback either).

The same would apply the other way around. Liberty says she assumes all customers are positive. I virtually assume the same with the girls - though I do have bareback oral sex, either way, which i would discontinue if the bug was present.

[Quiet Reflections]

there are also dating sites for people with all manner of diseases so it is also possible for one to go that route if necessary .

[danthepoetman]

Anyways, I’m sure containment is somewhat on sight. The disease is still relatively young, in terms of medical history. Progress has been steady and pretty fast. It’s never as fast as we which it was, but I tend to be optimistic. They’ll win over this as they have over others.

I remember, not such a long time ago, some religious figures insisting it was a punishment from God… People we’re dying so miserably and in such solitude, such abandonment. We’ve traveled a long way since then.

[sunairco]

I hate to sound cynical too. But I think that the money to be made from treatment and pharma profits only scratches the surface of reality. Entire structures have been formed during the past 30 years built on this. From the fundraiser on the street, professional coordinators, administrators, society benefit oranization, shit, the list can go on for pages until you get to the actual researchers and epidemiologists. Factor in the grants and endowments left from estates. There's an entire, vertically integated monolith built on the backs of poor souls that have AIDs that's matured and sunk deep roots much like the Cancer societies and other "charitable" diseases. Only a small percentage of this trickles down to research, while the rest feeds the machine. Do you think for one moment everybody is going to say, "let's get a vaccine out and this over with"? One fell swoop, a lifetime's career of a legion of infrastructure is going to come crashing down and they all are going to go home smiling and say "mission accomplished"? How long has cancer research, MDS research, you name it is going to go on if it affects just a minor portion of the population that over a lifetime billions can be milked in their name and cause? Then there's another issue. While sustainable birthrate is dropping in the western world, the third world is exponentially exploding in population. You don't think that the first world doesn't take notice of that and it's future implications? You don't think there's a contingent of nation-state politicians and futurists pondering the the scarcity of resources amid a growing third world? Wouldn't it be to their advantage to let something like AID's run it's natural course among the worthless and unproductive third world that's multiplying like vermin in their minds? I'm no conspricist and don't subscribe to any of that horseshit. But given history, there's no question that AID's devestation of Africa and the elements of the third world is looked upon as a natural reset of the balance by selective depopulation simply by looking the other way and not doing anything about it. We already seen that on a micro scale under Reagan here in the states by letting God take care of the "gay problem". Sure, maybe in a hundred years the battle will be won as long as the snail's pace can be maintained and sucessive populations wither away and become lost to history. Besides, they were worthless anyways.

Had this been a high contagion pandemic that was wiping out the elite and poised to depopulate the first world leaving the ferral classes and third world untouched to inherit the earth. Something would have happened a long time ago shortly after the human genome was first mapped.

Sorry, I've been on this earth too long to believe in the good of humanity.

[natina]

LOOK


FDA review favors first drug for HIV prevention

A pill that has long been used to treat HIV has moved one step closer to becoming the first drug approved to prevent healthy people from becoming infected with the virus that causes AIDS.

The Food and Drug Administration said Tuesday that Gilead Sciences' Truvada appears to be safe and effective for HIV prevention. It concluded that taking the pill daily could spare patients "infection with a serious and life-threatening illness that requires lifelong treatment."
On Thursday a panel of FDA advisers will consider the review when it votes on whether Truvada should be approved as a preventative treatment for people who are at high risk of contracting HIV through sexual intercourse. The FDA is not required to follow the advice of its panels, but it usually does.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/47345265/ns/health-aids/




http://www.hungangels.com/vboard/showthread.php?t=55700



Liberty wrote: "Another note about a cure .. do you really think the CDC and Pharmo companies will release a cure / vacine immediately upon one be ready lolz .. they have to much money to make at moment on people treating their condiitions rather than eradication of them at present ..."

A good point Ms Harkness. Your cynicism matches mine on this.
__________________

[natina]

do you know anyone who got a CDC letter?

http://www.hungangels.com/vboard/showthread.php?t=55700

[sunairco]

Do you realize how many times we've heard a canard like this?

One step closer...Clincial trials begin...offers new hope...will be a miracle of our time.

Diabetes
Cancers
Obesity
Cardiovascular Disease
Hepatitis B

For g-d's sake even Acne.

Yup, still waiting for that snowstorm in Hell.

[Ben]

How Big Pharma Caused an AIDS Genocide - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhJDraNzL8w)

[tao1kiku]

Even if Truvada worked as a preventative drug that you take every day (far from being a proper vaccine that is taken once only and may need to be topped up every few years), there are still many other STI's that can be transmitted/contracted through unprotected sex.

Having unprotected sex is a roll of the dice, pure and simple. There are some who have been quite lucky, and some roll craps their first time. It is a choice you make every time you have unprotected sex. It is also a choice you make for your partner unless you are both informed of potential risks. Because HIV can take a few months to show up on a test, you can be infected one night, have the test the next day and show as HIV Neg - and thus go about infecting others unknowingly.

An interesting question might be, if you knew you were HIV Pos, and someone wanted you to bareback them and they were Neg but were willing to take the risk, would you?

Pig sex is I believe more of men who are totally into barebacking, piss, no deodorant sweat ("man smells), etc.