60-year-old German man likely seventh person to be effectively cured from HIV
rfi.fr
rfi.fr
Not sure that's the issues here. I think the major risk comes with completely wiping the original immune system, before implanting the new seed cells. Apart from the implications in any means of killing "half the body", people are existentially defenseless against any pathogen around them, for a few weeks.
I think this procedure will never be reasonably safe, for anyone who isn't rolling their last die.
For most people the current regimens for treating HIV are excellent. They can get the viral load down to undetectable levels, which makes it impossible to transmit. And the side effects are minimal.
Transmission through sharing needles we have less confidence around, because illegal drug use is harder to study.
IIRC not everyone reaches an undetectable viral load through antiretroviral medication, so you do need to make sure that's the case. Pre-exposure prophylaxis and general safe sex practices like condoms can mitigate the risk for people with low-but-detectable viral load and their partners.
When everything seems dark and hopeless, this is one of the examples that always lifts my spirits. Humankind can achieve incredible things together.
In San Francisco
Deaths from AIDs dropped 70% from 1996 to 1997. That's in one year it went from a relentless death sentence to manageable chronic.
While almost everyone that got HIV in the mid 80's are dead most people that got HIV in the mid 90's are still here.
If that's not winning it's close.
I suspect a large portion of those deaths are due to poor sexual education thanks to christofascists, and people who don't get tested regularly because of poor access to family planning and reproductive health, again thanks to christofascists. All because Magical Sky God Said Abortion Bad.
That and people who lose their healthcare and can't afford the meds because this country is the only developed nation in the world which does not treat healthcare like a universal human right, because corporations want to keep using health coverage to keep workers from switching jobs more freely, because they don't want a free labor market.
About 270 patients, mostly children, were nosocomially infected with HIV subtype G in seventeen hospitals in 1988–1989. The infection was mainly transmitted between children through contaminated catheters and needles, and from children to mothers through breast-feeding.
I once spoke to a primary-care doctor about the risks of getting HIV through sex. The doctor told me that the risk of getting HIV the "typical way" (receiving anal sex) is about 1/72. Thus, for every 72 exposures, the recipient would contract HIV one time. This assumes that condoms are not used, and that the transmitter has an untreated HIV infection, which presumably has a high viral load.
Transmission risk goes down by orders of magnitude for other forms of sex, until we get to receiving blowjobs, where the risk is literally nil. There are zero recorded cases of HIV caused by receiving a blowjob.
In other words, HIV is actually kind of hard to get. You have to be very active, and not using protection, in order to get it. Or just be very, very unlucky. And that's with respect to untreated cases, which likely have high viral loads.
This suggests to me that, for practical purposes, undetectable levels are impossible to transmit. Or as the Prep marketing executives would say, "U means U" - undetectable means untransmittable.
Whether or not you're comfortable having sex with someone who is HIV+ but claims to have an undetectable viral load is a separate question entirely.
If someone has HIV, they would have to be extremely suicidal to forego taking the medication that would make them undetectable.
The way I was raised, I'm the only person I trust with my sexual health. I would never trust someones word they're tested recently and have unprotected sex with them. I wouldn't trust someone saying they're on PrEP and have unprotected sex with them either. I can only trust myself. U=U is exactly the same situation.
In a zero trust mindset like that, someone telling me they're U=U only tells me they have HIV. I have HIV+ friends who struggle to take their meds at the right time every day, or forget. And I also know people who have lied about when they last took their STI screening to hookups.
I'm also sure a bunch of people would get angry if you asked a U=U person to show you their latest CD4 count or viral load proof too - so what am I to do, just trust that, unlike everyone else, U=U people are perfectly honest, and never screw up taking their meds?
The response to this is often "anyone COULD have HIV, U=U people are actually safer because they have it locked down", but again to me this is about as trustworthy as "anyone COULD have HIV, but people on PrEP have it locked down". It all relies on the trust the other person is on top of their shit.
Of course long term relationships don't magically shield you against STI, but I'd hope there is enough trust to share test results of any kind that are relevant to this matter if you are having the discussion about going fluid bond. And you probably know the person well enough to know if they are reliable with taking their meds on time.
That's because you're a probably a normal and well-adjusted person with no chips on their shoulder.
> I see it a lot around the internet.
If you think the population's attitudes are what is visible to you on the internet, you'd be wrong 100% of the time.
Turns out, shaming people into silence on the internet does not change their minds about anything.
Since you don't immediately feel worse after not taking your pill once, it's very easy to slip up if you aren't the most organized / functioning person.
I knew it wasn’t one exposure and you would get it, but I honestly kinda figured the chances were higher than that.
Regarding oral, I was under the impression that the important caveat there was assuming you had no major sores in your mouth (like, maybe don’t do it after getting dental surgery). Since the reason it’s nil is due to the acids in your saliva and stomach, at least that is what my doctor told me.
(Also estimates chances for other risk profiles, including 0% for undetectable.)
Seems like you’ve got a good doc there
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/science-clear-...
Every time I hear someone praise Reagan all I can think about is how sat on his hands and did nothing while a hundred thousand Americans died - 30,000 in the last year of his presidency alone - because of bigotry on the part of him and the Christian Right, who are still to this day screaming that LGBTQ people shouldn't have the same rights as everyone else.