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 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., next week for AIDS 2012, an international conference being held in the USA 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/...p1qfECIYhsYtDh

[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:
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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.