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?
HIV is not easy to communicate to other people. Education and PrEP have reduced the problem immensely.
Sorry for the misunderstanding. I just feel like I’m taking crazy pills reading these comments.
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.
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.
I would prefer to speak as adults. Thanks.
By the way I never talked about camps, and to call fascist to other people in a discussion currently (instead to show real counter-arguments), is a really worn out strategy and a sign of laziness. Everybody does it (and it never solved anything).
> and to call fascist to other people in a discussion
Your words.
You should really have a long hard think about what you're saying. What you are proposing is utterly disgusting.
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.
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.