900 Children Test Positive for H.I.V. in Pakistani city of Ratodero
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
An obvious effect of this is that people will be terrified to get tested at all, as it's all downside with the possible upside of treatment being a distant dream. And that makes it both harder to evaluate the spread of the disease, and also harder to prevent further transmission of it.
As a selfish aside, I will never get a shave from a barber who doesn't have an autoclave.
Can you imagine if the US had done mandatory testing and quarantine all those years ago? Obviously many people would have had their rights violated to do that, but it might have stopped the disease a long time ago.
Voluntary self-quarantine clearly doesn't work.
> will be terrified to get tested at all
Or the opposite: Anyone not tested will be assumed to be infected.
> And that makes it both harder to evaluate the spread of the disease, and also harder to prevent further transmission of it.
Not if you have mandatory testing.
HIV is not easy to communicate to other people. Education and PrEP have reduced the problem immensely.
This. We choose to do things different in the past and hide the disease. In retrospective it was a terrible mistake IMHO.
The lets call it "human rights" way focused into preserving the rights of 10.000 or 100.000 people in the 80's. This proven to be a "genocide-level" idea for Africa (and other third world countries) that toke the lifes of 35 millions of people and helped to spread the disease from 100.000 to 75 millions. Currently there are 37 millions of people alive positive for the virus, and increasing.
We could instead to have choosed the, I will call it, "fascist way". Being ruthless about forcing the diagnostised carriers to be transparent about the condition. Having zero tolerance specially to the people caught infecting deliberately other people again and again. This would made the life more difficult for many innocent people, but the new cases would had stopped suddenly overnight. The VIH would have been solved in a decade saving millions of lives past and future.
The problem was that only the first way assured the future bussiness for the companies investing lots of money for developping the cure, so there was (more than probably) a strong marketing machine to teach us that any other option is taboo and evil.
Is a huge price that we had paid for the goodism. Maybe we should start refusing to keep paying it and do something. AIDS was a "once in life" event, a disease jumping between species by mistake in 1940, and there is not any logic reason to not point all our weapons into removing it from humans once and for good.
Yes, it is. Not only that, you're conflating "people caught infecting deliberately other people" with the totality of the HIV-positive population. That is a tiny, tiny group of people.
I can't believe this shit. It's not even worth arguing against it's so fucking depraved and immoral.
Nope. I'm not saying that. Read my post again
I think that the opposite is infinitely more probable. Less new cases when people has the knowledge to take reasoned decisions. The right to african wifes to know that her husband has become a carrier should prevail over the right from those men to hide the disease and remain silent for convenience. African doctors should assure to inform the wife by default in their protocols, because this people have rights also, and the number of cases are all except "tiny".
Desestigmatisation is exactly the opposite to hiding the disease, that is what we really are doing (and is not working).
And I say that is not working because still there are thousands of new cases in the world each year with the difference that nobody cares yet. Young generations do not developped the danger sense about HIV that scarred older generations in 80's and 90's. Some of this adolescents are being caught in the most stupid way (And good luck telling some people that must buy and use a condom every time).
Being transparent and loyal to your partner and society about the condition is a first requisite for desestigmatisation.
Who is testing mandatory for? The entire population? And to be effective it'd have to be done on a quarterly basis (as that's the period of time where many tests won't detect the antibodies, and also when the virus is most communicable).
Okay, so now you identify tens of thousands of HIV positive individuals every month. What do your quarantine camps look like? How expensive are they to maintain? Are death rates lower or higher in these HIV concentration camps than in the outside world?
If this is a brilliant idea, why haven't other countries with few to no rights (e.g. Russia) implemented it to deal with their HIV crisis?
What is the likelihood of a barber passing an transmissible disease? Any stats? Thanks.
Also, it’s really easy to get tested for it, you could go and get checked.
He's always a little puzzled when I'm "no thanks" to the razor.
I've never seen a barber with an autoclave for cleaning his equipment.
If I trusted that the autoclave was properly used, of course. Same as the dentist.
> The doctor recently renewed his medical certificate and now works as a general practitioner at a government hospital on the outskirts of Ratodero, despite laws that make the reuse of syringes an offense that is not eligible for bail.
So he was arrested for it, then while still not convicted, got a new certificate and is back at it?
Not to mention all the F-16s and Mirage fighters etc costing like $20 million each
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistan_Army#Corporate_and_bu...
https://www.google.com/search?q=micrograph+of+hypodermic+nee...
A single individual from a developed country could help pay for some as basic as discardable syringes for a whole town.
The doctor says he was too poor to afford syringes! So reuse of syringes is the solution? Bill the cost of the syringe to the patient. Ask for donations. Do whatever it takes but never reuse a syringe. How can a doctor find reuse of syringes remotely acceptable?
Wouldn’t it be nice if patients could afford anything. Reality doesn’t work that way though, and some first world people just can’t imagine what real poverty is like (I can’t either).
> When Mr. Jalbani protested, he said, Mr. Ghanghro snapped at him and told him he was using an old syringe because Mr. Jalbani was too poor to pay for a new one.
> “He said, ‘If you don’t want my treatment, go to another doctor.’” Mr. Jalbani said. “My wife and I had to starve ourselves to pay for the medicine.”
Perhaps there are more people that would prefer to watch the world burn than we think
In theory, such a treatment is possible, but in reality, they're just making everything worse.
What would be nice is if someone tried to find a viable solution for this issue, something that actually worked and was affordable.
"Affordability" makes no sense when these families (families, not individuals) are earning a few pennies a day. The only solution is to give stuff away for free at a loss. No amount of innovation or cost savings can fix the fact that people (and even institutions) cannot afford syringes.
The only real issue in the third world is none other than lack of capital generating opportunities. Anyone who has capital can participate in the global economy and fix their own problems. Anyone who has a job can perform daily labor to earn capital that can fix their problems. The people who get lost - the people stuck in the third world - are offered no opportunities that would enable them to trade their labor for capital. If there were enough of these opportunities, all of these problems would go away.
I did it once for one of my children. He was four and I didn't want him to be subjected to an IV.
Possible solutions include an oral or topical medication to replace the injected medication.
The poor in the US often also need actual affordable solutions that work. That seems to have improved some in recent years.
It won't exist if no one even bothers to try.
If money alone were all that mattered, you would think a country like the US wouldn't have thousands of homeless, etc.
>According to a 2015 assessment by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 564,708 people were homeless on a given night in the United States. At a minimum, 140,000 or 25 percent of these people were seriously mentally ill, and 250,000 or 45 percent had any mental illness.[1]
The homeless problem is a mental health problem. Sure, people can fall into hardship and get e.g. their houses foreclosed on and go bankrupt - but those same people generally are back on their feet a year or two later. Basically everyone who does not suffer from severe mental illness has the capability to raise enough capital on a monthly basis to put a roof over their heads. Now, they may have to work hard, and perhaps unreasonably hard in a sadly large amount of cases, but they can still do it and still do do it given that 99% of the country is not homeless.
[1] https://www.bbrfoundation.org/blog/homelessness-and-mental-i...
There are many factors that contribute to homelessness. Physical ailments can help lead to homelessness, but so can the high cost of housing:
Research by Zillow Group Inc. last year found that a 5 percent increase in rents in L.A. translates into about 2,000 more homeless people, among the highest correlations in the U.S. The median rent for a one-bedroom in the city was $2,371 in September, up 43 percent from 2010. Similarly, consultant McKinsey & Co. recently concluded that the runup in housing costs was 96 percent correlated with Seattle’s soaring homeless population. Even skeptics have come around to accepting the relationship. “I argued for a long time that the homelessness issue wasn’t due to rents,” says Joel Singer, chief executive officer of the California Association of Realtors. “I can’t argue that anymore.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-11-20/the-homel...
The story is gut wrenching. Children in poverty need free basic health services everywhere.
Compare that with $300 USD to see my GP for fifteen minutes...
A sobering reminder that our problems are, almost always, nothing in comparison.
Sounds widespread, probably not just that one man.
That said, hopefully the government of Pakistan is embarrassed enough to fund free treatment for this population. With treatment and compliance, HIV-positive people usually lead long, healthy lives.
Pakistani government (read military for all intents and purposes) is focused on concentrating wealth, power and land in the hands of generals, their children and a few land owners while the population at large is fed a steady diet of lies about enemies at the border and beyond.
This fear of others (india, isreal, america even) is used to spend and therefore siphon the resources into the pockets of powerful few. The stage is different, the story not so much.
That said, the epidemic itself is thought to have started as an offshoot of the epidemic in Israel. And right before the epidemic in Israel there was one in Pakistan, so there may be a direct connection as well.