Three women contract HIV from dirty "vampire facials" at unlicensed spa
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Per the report two cases were acute and one case (two?) had AIDS, yet they all fell within the same viral DNA cluster (AIDS if infected in 2018 would be rare). So it seems that they were infected at very different times, yet they share a common viral strand. One explanation was that the clinic was using infected blood rather than customers' own blood, but even that sounds weird.
That's incorrect. 8-10 years is generally reported as the "average" time from infection to AIDS, but faster progressions are by no means rare. One study found that up to 13% of newly infected patients may develop AIDS within one year. Developing AIDS 6 years out from infection is certainly unfortunate but by no means rare.
On HN, the comments are presented by default, and you have to click to get to the article.
I replied to your serverless comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40054222 Very interested in what more you have to say, if you're interesting in discussing it more.
The general ethos of my gripes with serverless are here (not my post): https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/14noh28/comment/jq95xz...
It excels in only one area: scaling. You can "scale down to zero" (to the point where if there is no usage, you theoretically are not paying for stand-by hardware). You also do not have to -- theoretically -- worry about scaling rules and about provisioning more hardware when your service needs more workers to handle demand.
However, everywhere else it is a shit-show. Not being able to do anything resembling local testing & debugging requires you either: keep the architecture very simple (why use serverless in that case?), try and spin up one of the numerous half-baked virtualization solutions, or spend more time writing, testing, and maintaining scaffolding/mocking/whatever to interface between all your "add-ons" (e.g. SQS, S3, etc.). Your only way to track message flow is with extensive and expressive logging.
Deployment is a pain. What should be a sub 30second operation is routinely 5mins for even the smallest packages (AWS deployment tools are stupid inefficient) -- annoyingly breaking any sort of flow every time you have to deploy to test things you cannot test locally. Now imagine that being your working loop every day -- utter madness if you want to keep any sort of velocity or morale.
The ecosystem is not mature. I still have packaging utilities (built and maintained by a mag7) that fail silently causing production outages. The other tooling is also half-baked and a pain in the ass to use (much less learn the edge cases around). Serverless (the framework) is a shitty replacement for Terraform. The lack of a language server to understand whether or not my YAML IaC will actually do what I want it to do without dry-running is tedious.
Containers are wasteful, half-baked, and unperformant.
My workloads have always been either CPU or I/O heavy. No I do not need 2GB of RAM and a single (unknown spec) vCPU. I need at most a 100MB of RAM for my JVM/CLR and a fast-enough CPU. But the only way to provision a faster/less gimped CPU is to "bump the tier" of the lambda by provisioning more memory. Ergo you pay for memory you do not use nor need, simply so your lambda doesn't time out in its maximum 15min container lifespan, on heavy workloads.
The file handle limits are also something asinine, like 128 open handles per lambda with no way to modify. So I cannot open more than ~128 network sockets when I need to fan out compute to get past kneecapped container resources.
Cold-starts: it's been beaten to death. But if you're running a language with a bytecode interpreter your options are to either provision concurrency (i.e. force a container to always be warm/spun-up, and incurring all those costs, which would have been unarguably cheaper with a server, even an EC2) or modify your source and ahead-of-time compile everything you can. Otherwise, you will not get sub 300ms cold invocations (a sever in the most optimal location would get you sub 10ms latencies).
If you have long-running workloads or are trying to squeeze the most performance out of your backend: serverless is not going to cut it. This is ignoring all the inter-infrastructure communication that add even more latency.
N.B. this is for moderately complex web apps built on AWS, it may not be wholly representative of the landscape.
And apologies for the harsh language, but the entire "serverless" hype has given me plenty of scar tissue -- especially in a "move fast, now!" startup landscape.
One suggestion/correction: "Your only way to track message flow is with extensive and expressive logging.", you can do distributed tracing. It not a silver bullet, nor does it replace a proper debugger, but it's better than following logs. You can use a number of distributed tracing SaaS's, but you still have to do at least some manual instrumentation in your code to add additional info.
I've had this done. They draw your own blood and run it through a centrifuge to extract the plasma. there is NO reason the people getting this should have had to worry if not for the complete and other negligence and callousness of th clinic.
without really any supporting evidence for efficacy, why? not snark, curiosity.
>there is NO reason the people getting this should have had to worry if not for the complete and other negligence and callousness of th clinic.
this is true of tattoo parlors, too -- but they are a common and repeated disease vector even under regulation.
Someone gets sick, they close and re-hire under a new proprietor. The practices clean up for awhile, until they aren't.
that's not always the case -- there are plenty of places where the prices are rocket-level but services dismal
you can hide a lot using marketing...
Edit: But it still sounds like an insane thing to do.
The place was reusing needles and whatnot.
I have a manageable disease (not HIV), and one of my biggest (albeit fantasy) gripes is that for better or worse I cannot choose to opt out of society.
I can't live on a desert island. I'll die if i'm ever a castaway regardless of how well packed the island is with coconut trees.
More realistically it means that I can't be away from 'shipping range' for any more than a week or two before supplies dwindle and I meander back to society, having hit the extents of my leash.
This sucks as a sailor. It's actually not manageable with the hobby of sailing long distances, forcing all sorts of compromises that turn the hobby into something different.
So, when someone describes something as manageable, well, it's generic and leaves out so much context as to be worthwhile for only a small feel-good sound-bite. Maybe that person finds it manageable; it's not advice to be applied globally.
I would definitely group HIV with the "nastier stuff".
Even in larger cities it is quite rare to see patients with full-blown AIDS - and the few times that happens, it comes down to:
- Severe drug addiction and (often combined with) mental illness that results in the patient not being able to follow the drug regiment. This is the main reason.
- Religious reasons, homeopathy, etc. The patient believes they can prey the illness away, use alternative medicine, or similar.
- Extreme denial. The patient simply doesn't believe they have HIV, and thus refuse to take medication.
Most places in the western world HIV medication is free, for obvious reasons.
The societal pressure on women to look young and beautiful is ridiculous. And influential women actively promoting such garbage is part of the problem.
Men get former Mr. Universe's modeling "eat right and exercise." (Arnold in case you aren't getting the reference.) Women get this kind of crap.
Steroid use is increasingly common among "hobby bodybuilders", a predominantly male demographic, which has all sorts of nasty side effects. Now there are apparently also procedures where young men break their bones to gain a few centimeters in height.
While cosmetic procedures aren't as common among men as they are in women, they're getting increasingly popular. So saying its "never" men is a huuuuuuuugeeee stretch.
Unless you want to insist modern medicine has deep flaws and needs a major overhaul. Good luck getting taken seriously with such opinions.
Furthermore, the steroids that you are referring to are most likely corticosteroids [2], which are most certainly not prescribed to "boost your immune system" but rather to reduce the immune response when it is excessive, or even suppress it to treat autoimmune diseases.
Please don't assume that off-label anabolic steroid usage is somehow safe and healthy only because modern medicine uses completely different compounds which happen to share a portion of their chemical structure for treating specific medical issues.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steroid
I'm not assuming it's safe. I'm merely asserting it's not as cut and dried as "steroids: bad."
Don't you think that is an example of men doing 'stupidly risky stuff' for cosmetic reasons?
Injecting blood into the skin on your face is purely cosmetic.
And I have a lot of experience with doing things that helped my health in the face of not having a proper diagnosis for nearly 36 years that other people were highly critical of, so I'm a tad skeptical that young men using steroids are all 100 percent merely being stupid and self destructive.
No doubt that some are. But I feel it's more complicated than the kinds of cosmetic crap women tend to do.
No need to strawman my comment
There is no clear cut, bright line between life and health. The body doesn't care if you took steroids with a prescription or without one.
As noted in another comment, Arnold Schwarzenegger has a heart condition. I have read it might have killed him at a young age if he hadn't been a devoted fitness nut.
He admits to using steroids. He's still alive.
The body doesn't, but the person who prescribes the medication does. With any medication there are tradeoffs to be made. A doctor is usually able to make a more qualified assessment of said tradeoffs than the average patient.
After all, the tradeoffs of taking anabolic steroids are plenty, especially when taken over longer periods of time.
And not to mention the fact that the stuff people source illegaly is rarely chemically as safe as the stuff used as medication.
> He's still alive.
He is, many other high profile bodybuilders aren't. While that's not a medically meaningful statistic, these are the people whose aesthetics young men strive for.
So my view of modern medicine is a tad more jaded than yours and I guess this is where we agree to disagree.
He also apparently has a heart condition that might have killed him had he not been a fitness nut. Instead, he had heart surgery and called someone in Hollywood from his hospital bed to be emotionally supportive when their movie was doing poorly which just made the guy go something like "Oh. He's hospitalized and calling me to cheer me up. It's worse than I feared!"
Both toxic masculinity and toxic femininity exist.
I had to look him up. Never heard of him.
In contrast, Arnold is pretty darn famous.
So is Kim Kardashian.
Toxic femininity seems more mainstream than toxic masculinity and, in fact, this is the first time I've heard anyone use that expression. Most people think this cult of youth and beauty is fine and critics like me are weirdos.
Edit: hmm maybe that is societal pressure in a way
It might be useless, but I wouldn't tell someone with a useless habit that it's dangerous.
PRP injections are a relatively safe procedure, and should not give you HIV. The risk of HIV comes from using unsafe medical practices like sharing needles, and this exact same risk exists when injecting other substances like Synthol.
> Side effects of PRP injections are very limited because the injections are created from your own blood, and your body should not reject them or react in any negative way. As with any injection, there is a remote risk of infection. Otherwise, there are no significant risks apart from the variability and unpredictability of how effective the treatment will be for a particular patient.
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/treatment-tests-and-t...
Stupidity is everywhere. Saying some things are moderately stupid in x thing, so face-palming about egregious stupidity in y thing is an overreaction is essentially dismissive of valid concerns.
But it's not this shit in the name of youth and beauty.
Yeah its shit in the name of a bigger biceps and a bigger junk, I don't see how that is any better?
Are we at the stage of inserting silicone in your junk so your jock strap looks better?
(Please note you can just pad your bra if you want to look busty fully clothed. And it leaves scars, so I'm skeptical of the value it has for looking good naked or in teeny, tiny bikinis.)
Yes. Packers exist. Also Synthol is oil injected into your muscles to make them look better.
Searching "packers for your junk" or "penile implants" doesn't get me anything that sounds like it's what this comment is referring to.
Please and thank you.
Yes? People do get penis enlargement surgery, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penis_enlargement#Surgical_met... or phalloplasty which has a Wikipedia page I'd rather not link here.
Not really a fair comparison to breast augmentation though, which is more similar to the plastic surgery muscles some people get. Or hair plugs.
While I think it's much worse for women, acting like it only affects women is disingenuous.
My general understanding is that phallus enlargement is intended to enhance sexual pleasure whereas breast enlargement has no such function and from what I gather likely reduces sexual pleasure for the woman.
But I don't have a phallus, haven't seen one in ages and I'm perfectly happy to be educated on the topic by actual penis-having peoples more in the know than little ole me.
I'm no expert on the subject, but I've always thought people primarily got them to look better with maybe some hope of performing better for their partner. I've never thought they were for their pleasure, except in the same way as breast enlargement where you enjoy pleasing your partner.
Still, I think a better comparison is "men get hair treatments, primarily as a looks thing."
Vampire Facials are used on balding men -
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2764957/One-Kim-K...
This is not stupidly risky stuff. It was the unlicensed clinic at fault.
There is nothing wrong about wanting to look good. There is nothing wrong with working to achieve something. There is also nothing wrong with doing risky things.
I feel like solving the worlds issues isn't needed when talking about vampire facials. It's been used medically as well. It's an interesting tech.
It's more interesting to try and understand does it actually work.
I'm a woman on an overwhelmingly male forum giving my take. As a demographic outlier for this forum, my take tends to not be what most people here would say.
Sometimes, people find that insightful, thought provoking and valuable.
Sometimes it looks like this.
I have zero ability to predict beforehand which it will be.