#hiv

[gentlemanbutch]

the way that no one wears a mask at my local LGBTQ clinic, and in fact comments on my mask like it's just this hilarious little idiosyncrasy that I still wear one and not because I'm immunocompromised and we're in the middle of a pandemic ... as if there isn't an airborne virus that literally fucks up your immune system ... as if we didn't lose a generation of queer people to another virus that fucks up your immune system ...

[gatalentan]

In the midst of that amazing time in my life came the worst, and that was when my friends just started dropping dead. They were sick today and dead tomorrow. And when you would go to the hospital to look for you friend they would be out in the hallway on a gurney pushed up against a wall dying for help, dying for love, dying to be saved. And some of them with that sign on their gurney that said "do not touch". And they suffered, and people wanted to act like they weren't good people, kind people, wonderful people, somebody's son, somebody's daughter, somebody. // SHERYL LEE RALPH receiving the Human Rights Campaign's National Ally for Equality Award 2022. (x)

[macleod]

In case some of you didn't know, some lawyers and conservatives are now using the Roe decision to begin calling for the ban of PrEP and all HIV related medication. Why? Because they believe that those life-saving medications "enable homosexual behavior" . They are going to be using this new power to attack and demean everyone they see as the enemy. They are stoking and fighting for a war, they want us all to die unless we assimilate under their christofascist beliefs.

[53v3nfrn5]

Dennis Rodman’s hairstyles

[politijohn]

Source

[vaspider]

My question about the AIDS crisis, I'm mostly asking you because like I said, I don't think I was googling the right things, so even if you could just suggest some things to google that would be more likely to get me answers, that would be really helpful.

I guess it's mostly how did AIDS (and to some extent, any STD) become so widespread? I know that it spread through sexual contact and shared blood, but can you really "six degrees of separation" (god, that sounds so flippant, but i genuinely can't think how else to describe it) a chain of sexual partners and shared needles through any two people with HIV in the entire world? Maybe it's just because I'm a bit of a hermit, but while I can understand how it was so devastating once it was already widespread, I guess I'm having trouble understanding how it got such a foothold in the first place. If the first person with HIV had happened to not have a lot of sex would the AIDS crisis never have happened?

I swear I have absolutely no judgement for people that like to have a lot of sex, maybe I just have an underestimate of the amount of sex the average person has because frankly I don't have any? So I hope this doesn't sound disrespectful or anything, it's just kind of hard for me to believe those "six degrees of separation" kind of things in general when it's not like, famous people, so the realization that theoretically any two people with the same STD, on different parts of the globe, would have this string of sexual partners connecting them almost feels like there has to be something I'm missing... But when I'm googling things like "how did HIV become so widespread" and "how do STDs spread" I'm just getting things about how you should use protection and histories of *where* HIV spread rather than answering this more specific question (probably didn't help I was trying to do this research at 1am)

I mean this as kindly as possible:

What is your proposed alternate theory as to the spread of a disease which is transmitted through contact with blood, semen (and pre-seminal fluid), rectal and vaginal fluids, and breast milk? The disease does not spread through saliva or through touch which does not involve those fluids.

There are relatively rare cases of HIV spread through accidental needle sticks - according to WebMD, there are approximately 385k accidental needle sticks among health care workers per year in the US. WHO says that .7% of the global population has HIV, so for some back-of-the-napkin math, at most, you'll have about 2,700 of those needle sticks involving someone with HIV. Since (again, according to that WebMD article on accidental needle sticks), in cases of an accidental needle stick where the patient has HIV, the health care worker only has about a 1 in 300 chance of catching it (as opposed to 1 in 3 for an unvaccinated person catching hepatitis B via accidental needle stick from an infected patient). So - nationwide - you have approximately 9 people per year catching HIV from a needle stick.

And, to be clear, that fucking sucks. However, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2022 there were approximately 14.7 million health care workers in the US. Not all of these people have equal risk for accidental needle sticks, but there's only so much research I'm gonna do for rough math to answer an ask on Tumblr.

The average US health care worker has approximately - again, based on my back-of-the-napkin math - 0.00000544% chance of contracting HIV from an accidental needle stick. It's astronomically more likely that a random health care worker will die from tripping over an extension cord or breathing in a caustic chemical than that they will catch HIV.

The chances of getting HIV via blood transfusion before we started routinely testing for it were all but assured if you got blood from someone with HIV. Testing now is so stringent that you have about a one in two million chance of getting HIV from a transfusion. The last recorded case I could find was in 2010, and before that, it was 2002, and the 2010 case happened in part because the donor lied about his risk profile and often participated in anonymous and unprotected sex with partners of multiple genders. He really shouldn't have been accepted as a donor at all. Approximately 4.5 million Americans receive blood transfusions per year, so, like, nowadays, it is excessively unlikely, but even in the 80s, it was an edge case means of infection, not a main source of pandemic spread.

A breastfeeding parent with a detectable viral load has about a 15% chance of transmitting HIV through breast milk. Likewise, HIV can be - and was - transmitted to babies during birth because of contact with vaginal fluid or blood, but, again, these relative edge cases are not the things pandemics are made of.

I want to stress that I am not in any way minimizing the absolute tragedy of the AIDS crisis, and I am not dismissing the fact that these methods of transmission are possible and did cause significant disruption to blood banks, stress for pregnant people with HIV, and so on. They just simply are not major methods of transmission, and never were.

With all of that said... what is your proposed alternate method of transmission, with these facts in hand? What do you think happened? Genuinely, this question is so baffling to me.

I think it's important to understand that before the emergence of HIV, most of the STIs we had were at that point either considered an annoyance (warts, HPV) or were extremely easy to treat and cure (syphilis, once a death sentence, became basically a non-issue for most people in the US as long as they were getting tested relatively frequently, and most other common STIs even today can be cured with a single course or even a single dose of antibiotics).

With that in mind, a lot of people, including a lot of queer people, were having a lot of unprotected sex. For people who could become pregnant, the advent of the pill and access to legal abortion meant that they didn't have to become or stay pregnant if they didn't want to, and for cis gay men, the prevalence of antibiotics meant that the vast majority of STIs were a brief inconvenience at worst.

So allo people did one of the things that allo people (and some ace people!) love to do:

They fucked. A lot. They fucked without fear of much consequence in terms of infection, and because it was much riskier to bring someone home where you could be seen, a lot of gay men cruised, fucking in parks or in literal back alleys or the bathrooms of clubs. They worried about getting arrested or getting caught and having their names in the newspaper much more than they worried about STIs. Sex workers, including trans sex workers, fucked in cars or hotels or... wherever the money was, because survival sec work is ... survival.

So... yeah. What is your proposed alternate theory, here? I am truly baffled at what you think otherwise happened, given a disease with a very narrow route of infection.

[hivthenandnow]

HIV lost an amazing advocate - since childhood she was an outspoken activist who opened a lot of people’s eyes especially in the early years of the epidemic. May she be at peace now.

[mindblowingscience]

For a vaccine to work, it has to raise antibodies in the immunized – antibodies that are primed to neutralize subsequent intruders. For a vaccine to be safe, it has to do so for the vast majority without major side effects or reactions. A new vaccine candidate for HIV is facing those familiar challenges in early-stage clinical trials, succeeding in one aspect but encountering some hurdles in the other. It's still progress though, as its developers have reformulated the vaccine to improve its safety in future studies – while their latest results show how the vaccine successfully generates broadly neutralizing antibodies in a small number of people.

Continue Reading.

[yourdailyqueer]

Richard Hunt (deceased)

Gender: Male

Sexuality: Gay

DOB: 17 August 1951 

RIP: 7 January 1992

Ethnicity: White - American

Occupation: Puppeteer

Note: Because he was too ill with AIDS to do so, Hunt was the only Muppet Show puppeteer who did not return for The Muppet Christmas Carol, which is dedicated to his memory as well as that of Jim Henson.

[liberaljane]

Zero stigma, Zero AIDS-related Deaths & Zero New HIV Infections.

Created with Getting to Zero Massachusetts

Digital illustration of a group of people of different ages, races, sexualities, genders and abilities. In the center is a Black woman holding a sign that reads, 'together we can end the HIV epidemic.'

[commiepinkofag]

Dr. Gao Yaojie: Dissident doctor who exposed China's AIDS epidemic, dies at 95

Her work uncovered how businesses selling blood led to the spread of HIV in the countryside.

She was at the forefront of AIDS activism in China and traveled across the country treating patients, often at her own expense.

A gynecologist by training, she encountered her first AIDS patient in the central province of Henan in 1996.

While she was not the first Chinese doctor to expose the AIDS epidemic, it was her efforts that made the situation known to the country and beyond.

She told the Associated Press in a previous interview that she withstood government pressure and persisted in her work because “everyone has the responsibility to help their own people. As a doctor, that’s my job. So it’s worth it.”

[aziraphales-library]

Hi! Your work is just amazing and for at least a year now I've been trying to find a fic but I can't see to find it... it was a human AU in wich Aziraphale was the child of someone that had a huge mining compagny and Crowley had an accident, he lost an eye,Aziraphale felt so much guilt he left and they find each other back again years after

If it can help I also remember that Aziraphale had HIV but was taking medication for it

Oh and Crowley wanted to be a pilot but couldn't because of his injury

Thank you so much for your amazing work!

Hello! Yes, it's this one:

The False and the Fair by Princip1914 [E]

Growing up in the shadow of West Virginia’s Eden Mountain, Aziraphale Wright always expected to work for the family coal mining company. Anthony Crowley, the son of a down-and-out miner, was going to become a pilot and leave town forever. Now, thirty years later, neither of their lives have gone as planned, and an unexpected inheritance brings them back into one another’s orbit. Aziraphale hopes that they can move beyond their shared past, and a high school arrangement that ended in disaster, but he has secrets of his own that threaten their fragile reconnection…

~Mod N

[houseofpurplestars]

Idk who needs to hear this but COVID is actually worse than HIV.

HIV has to destroy your immune system before it becomes neurodegenerative (hurts your brain.) COVID is IMMEDIATELY neurodegenerative, and also wrecks your immune system.

Please wear a mask.

[mapsontheweb]

HIV Prevalence from 1985 to 2005.

[yamameta-inc]

Excerpts from a good Twitter thread on the similarities between COVID-19 and HIV. Here's a link to the complete thread and links to all the studies involved.

To be clear, there has been and still is a lot of denialism within the medical community, but the facts are basically indisputable by now. And many institutions know it, even if they won't say anything. The Merck Manual, the longest-running English-language medical manual in the world, quietly added COVID-19 to the list of causes of lymphocytopenia. Other causes: HIV and malnutrition. A short list.

If you're interested in reading more research about Covid's effects on the body, here's a list to spring off of.

[mindblowingscience]

The researchers activated specific immune cells that induce broadly neutralizing antibodies in monkeys. The next phase of the work will now move to testing in humans. “This study confirms that the antibodies are, at the structural and genetic levels, similar to the human antibody that we need as the foundation for a protective HIV vaccine,” says Kevin O. Saunders, associate professor in the departments of surgery, molecular genetics and microbiology, and integrative immunobiology at Duke University and first author of the study published in the journal Cell.

Continue Reading.