It is my understanding that gay people have more sex partners than than straight people, so it's likely that these diseases will disproportionately affect gay men.
I think that limiting amount of partners is a vital part to combating sexually transmitted diseases, and that some people will have sex until they encounter the physical limitation of STDs. Not sure "sex-positive" messaging is quite helpful in this sense.
Like, this doesn't apply to people who get cervical cancer from HPV or other similarly tragic outcomes of acquiring an STD. The cruelty on the scale is way above anything.
https://www.vox.com/2015/12/1/9828348/ronald-reagan-hiv-aids
Audio from those press conferences is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAzDn7tE1lU
Another way to think of it: it's also highly likely that if you go to a crowded event that there are tons of diseases you can expose yourself to. Pre-COVID, people used to talk about getting "SXSW flu", e.g. with so many crowded events at SXSW it was nearly impossible to avoid getting sick. Importantly, at some times (obviously when there was a high prevalence of COVID), I think this risk is too great and crowds should be avoided. At other times, though, I think it's utterly reasonable to think that the risk of a cold or flu is worth it to go to a bunch of fun concerts. Nobody ever talks about "You know, there will always be a ton of dangerous diseases associated with concert-going, so you should always avoid them."
So when it comes to sex, I find it totally reasonable to adjust your behavior based on the risk at the time. Currently, e.g. for a gay man on PrEP, lets look at potential risks:
1. HIV risk is extremely low for those who adhere to PrEP.
2. Most bacterial infections can be cured straightforwardly with antibiotics.
3. The biggest risks are then (a) lifetime viral diseases, primarily Herpes, and (b) at this point, multi-drug resistant gonorrhea.
Thus, I think it's important to be aware of #3 and to take precautions, again relevant to your risk level, accordingly. What I don't think makes sense is to say "But you never know what could spring up!" That's true, but if you look at the recent monkeypox outbreak, I think a lot of people had the right approach: when the outbreak was publicized, many people (a) stopped or reduced their number of sexual partners and then (b) got vaccinated as quickly as possible.
The primary point I'm making is to disentangle the real risks associated with sex (and to treat them dispassionately) from the the moralizing around "you're a dirty whore if you have sex a lot."
That said, the respiratory route is very distinct from the oral, genital and anal route.
On a spectrum of frequency of contact, respiratory is the most frequent, then comes oral/digestive, then genital, and finally anal.
The more frequent and vital a route is, the more natural and artificial resources we can allocate to combat infections.
So infections spread by talking to each other, being vital, gets a vaccine developed in less than a year, and gets diverse natural antibodies.
On the other hand, a disease that spreads among adults who seek pleasure, will be allocated less resources, more so if it spreads preferentially through non reproductive sex.
Aids on the respiratory system would be fucking deadly, but my guess is that it would never spread there because there's more protection mechanisms, respiratory is like a process running unprivileged on an open port 80. Genital is port 22 and anal-genital is rdp or teamviewer with admin privileges on a server.
Dude, considering we're not even done yet with a worldwide pandemic caused by a deadly respiratory virus, I'd probably stop with the bad analogies.
In the developing world, it has nothing to do with promiscuity but lack of education and access to preventative measures like condoms and PrEP.
https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/library/reports/hiv-surveillance/vol...
[0] https://www.hiv.gov/hiv-basics/overview/data-and-trends/stat...
Did you take a second to google this idea you had to see if it made sense? No; because if you had, you'd have found that HIV is spread by blood, semen, pre-seminal fluid, rectal fluids, vaginal fluids, breast milk. People who inject hormones, silicone, steroids, and drugs, can get or transmit HIV by sharing needles, syringes, or other injection equipment. It can be spread through pregnancy or stepping on an infected needle at the beach. It's often spread by not using protection during sex. And straight and gay people both get it.
Gay people do not have more sex partners than straight people. Promiscuous people do have more partners than non-promiscuous people. Gay, straight, bi, queer, etc, can all be promiscuous, just like they can all also be monogamous or even asexual. You may not like that de-simplification, but it exposes the flaw in this notion that gay people are sluts and sluts get STDs. It just doesn't work that way. Safe sex, even if you fuck a lot of people, makes you much less likely to get an STD than if you only occasionally had sex and never use protection. In countries with limited access to safe sex, all people across all demographics contract it. It's not just poor Africans and gay men, despite that being the unfortunately common misconception.
Of course not, they are propagated by poneis and unicorns. Nothing to do with having sex with multiple partners.
> Gay people do not have more sex partners than straight people.
You are deluded. Not only gay people have higher median number of sexual partners, but our sexual network is tighter, since fewer people are gay compared to straight. That's a perfect environment for sexual diseases to spread, which was the case with AIDS and more recently MPox.
On average, gay men will have more sexual partners than straight men. There's no reason to deny this.
https://www.psypost.org/2020/07/lgb-people-and-extraverts-te...
>transmit HIV by sharing needles
The vast majority of new infections are through gay men having sex. IV drug use only accounts for 7% of new infections
https://www.hiv.gov/hiv-basics/overview/data-and-trends/stat...
>but it exposes the flaw in this notion that gay people are sluts and sluts get STDs.
Your insecurities don't change the facts. Gay men have more sex and more sex leads to more STDs.
https://stanfordhealthcare.org/medical-conditions/sexual-and...
In the US.
The vast majority of infections (90%) in Africa are from heterosexual sex:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12665438/#:~:text=Abstract,a....
The primary driver of the enormous epidemic ongoing in Russia is by far IV drug users (and heterosexual sex):
https://www.politico.eu/article/everything-you-wanted-to-kno...
"Although needle-sharing among drug addicts was one of the main reasons the disease spread so quickly, most HIV transmissions in Russia — 57 percent — are now a result of heterosexual sex. Drug use is responsible for 40 percent, while gay sex accounts for around 3 percent, according to Russia’s Federal Research Center for AIDS Prevention and Control in Moscow."
The majority of people living with HIV worldwide are straight women (52%):
https://www.unwomen.org/en/what-we-do/hiv-and-aids/facts-and....
I agree with you that the claim from some people to make like sex and number of sexual partners has nothing to do with STDs is ridiculous. It annoys me a great deal.
Gay men are disproportionately at risk and affected due to number of partners and type of sex. But most people with AIDS are straight.
Anyway your LGB link is funny because it claims (I think out of confusion) that lesbians have more partners as well. But lesbians also have the lowest std rates of any group. Making them obviously the best and most morally superior of the orientations.
Obviously HIV can be spread by other vectors, that doesn’t make what I’ve said above not true. This is one of the most illogical comments I’ve seen in awhile, purely wishful thinking. Promiscuity is fine, but don’t be naive.
Once you're on the receiving end of these "averaged" generalizations, you realize that it's not a great idea to think that way or to try to rationalize using them. It's like the people that say things like "on average, black people commit more crime" and then use that oversimplification to justify racial bias.
(and yeah, i'm probably gonna be flagged for pointing out the logical fallacies that get propagated to justify systemic racism, misogyny, homophobia and slut-shaming, but i'm not gonna censor myself to avoid pointing out fallacious tropes in common discourse)
Some factors that lead people to a promiscuous livestyle also lead them to high risk behaviours, probably because they see promiscuous sexual behaviour also as risky and, in turn, desirable.
I met many that would frown upon condoms, but I also met many that would see them as no big deal.
I for one would count myself as risk averse, and got to that lifestyle through other motivations, and in turn, always ensured to stay safe.
It's much more important to have safe sex. Condoms and PrEP work.
Every thread on HN about HIV/AIDS seems to attract at least one person who feels obliged to say something about how promiscuous gay people are. I don't think these comments often come from a good place. (For example, you have previously made a rather insensitive joke about 'pozzing' on this site.)
Just the one? If only.
Every time there is a story on HN that is even tangentially related to either HIV or LGBTQ+ sexual health, it inevitably devolves into a morass of misinformation and thinly-veiled homophobia. There are different degrees of it - some is presented in a more "civil" veneer, which helps it stay upvoted, but at its core, it's all coming from the same place.
Public health professionals who specialize in HIV and LGBTQ+ sexual health are actually pretty unanimous in their position on this topic, but somehow that never sways these folks (which should be a pretty good sign that they're not arguing in good faith).
In this case I think the relevant position is widely known. Supporting people to have safe sex works, whereas shaming them for having more than some vaguely specified maximum number of acceptable sexual partners does not work.
This is a statement of fact, please stop mistaking it as a moral judgement that we need to fight against. You cannot help mitigate or solve a problem without accepting reality.
Straight sex workers exist. Given straight people outnumber gay people by (let's say) 10:1, there is almost certainly a higher absolute number of straight promiscuous potential superspreaders than there are gay ones.
Even in the middle of the bell curve, nearly 50% of American babies are born to unmarried parents, so it's not like strict monogamy is the norm among straight people [0]
The reason that HIV transmitted so well in gay male populations is because receptive anal sex has a 20x higher likelihood of transmission than receptive vaginal sex and a 40x higher likelihood of transmission vs. incentive sex.[1]
Within the gay community, you have plenty of men who engage in that relatively high risk act of receptive anal sex, who then go on to be the insertive party in another interaction.
Within straight populations, the potential spreaders are just much less likely to contract HIV in the first place.
Sorry to be so specific about something sexual, but I have always found it odd that this very practical information has not been put into the mainstream. I guess it's the imperfect middleground - people who want to shame gay men don't care about the data and people who support gay men don't want to stigmatize receptive anal sex. But unfortunately, I bet it's led to a lot of needlessly risky behaviors.
[0]https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/unmarried/unmarrie... [1] https://stanfordhealthcare.org/medical-conditions/sexual-and....
Part of it is literally seeing the ladder being pulled up just as we reached for it. Not just for jobs or college tuition, but also sexually -- the previous generation had a pretty good time and the worst that was on offer was herpes. Puberty starts rumbling around and we're wondering what the future looks like and suddenly "GRID." And we were flailing around, is it viral? (There was, most people do not know, a period wherein it was thought that this was some kind of weird immune reaction to getting semen, any semen, into the bloodstream, which seemed unlikely to me even as a tween) How transmissible is it? Okay so maybe kissing doesn't do anything. And by the time that we figured out that it isn't exactly Ebola in terms of transmissibility, some damage was done.
So, Sex = Death, rain is acid, the bees are coming, the nukes will eradicate us all. Gen X has been waiting for the other shoe to drop for decades and AIDS was just one facet of it.
Oh well.
Not just for my own peace of mind, but potential partners have asked to see it in the past. Different cultures I guess. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Prior to fairly recently, it was easily cured if detected.
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/multi-drug-...
There's this idea that every generation bitches about the generation that comes after it, but I submit to you that every generation apparently also has people in it that see themselves as a special victim, as if the generations that came before it didn't also have their own challenges.
It's hard to love / there's so much to hate / hanging on to hope / when there is no hope to speak of / And the wounded skies above / say it's much too late / So maybe we should all be praying for time.
They released that on the radio, it went to #1 on the Billboard charts, and stayed on the charts for 10 weeks. All while the First Gulf War was starting. Which he wouldn't have known when he was writing it.
To anyone that missed out, dying of AIDs is horrible. The West has the luxury of expensive drugs to treat it, but much of the developing world doesn't have that, and they are still dying like flies, with very little of the transmission happening through homosexual contact.
Africa has a big problem with that, and misogyny also plays into it, as the article mentions.
The thing that disgusted me the most, was the "Good riddance" attitude of many folks. I see echoes of that, in the Fentanylopocalypse, going on, now. As soon as Muffy and Biff start popping their clogs, though, it becomes a "national tragedy."
Fortunately life expectancies are steadily rising even in the African countries hardest hit by HIV. Eswatini for instance has over 25% of the population HIV positive, but the life expectancy is now up to around 60 years (it was around 40 two decades ago), only 5 years behind Pakistan.
That's not really true, as the article points out. PEPFAR has really done amazing work lowering the HIV mortality rate in developing countries. And a reminder of who may keep this program from being reauthorized: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2023/07/29/pepfar-aids...
Most of Africa is still a pretty terrible place to be gay, though.
There's also a fairly pervasive problem with sexual violence. Women tend to bear a lot of the pain.
I suspect you're trying to convey the preference for sex without a condom as misogynistic, except that women also prefer sex without a condom, it's a question of safety vs pleasure.
ChatGPT, is that you?
> A prophylactic is a medication or a treatment designed and used to prevent a disease from occurring. For example, prophylactic antibiotics may be used after a bout of rheumatic fever to prevent the subsequent development of Sydenham's chorea.
> A prophylactic is also a drug or device, particularly a condom, for preventing pregnancy.
In this case, dental treatments are used to prevent gum disease and tooth decay, for this reason, they are considered prophylactic treatments.
I guess we’ll just have to get used to this kind of thing.
But these days, people are lacing pot with fentanyl, so when Thurston Howell XIV smokes a joint at a Harvard frat party, he might well be dead, by the time he hits the floor.
At the time we were working on reverse transcriptase inhibitors, which I think eventually turned out to work pretty well as an early treatment. But boy, was the process slow... decades of basic and applied biology... to get where we are today.
It's so painful to watch COVID vax deniers today because it's hard enough to stay motivated over long periods of time... but when people just sort of crap all over the important scientific and medical work to get to where we are, it reminds me of some of the aggressive groups, such as Act Up SF (which actively fought against the establishment, including Fauci, who was a critical ally to HIV-infected patients at the time): https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/31/opinion/anthony-fauci-hiv...
I'm not convinced that the trauma of Covid for some adults wasn't re-experiencing the trauma of the AIDS epidemic. Here's another scary disease and we don't know how it's communicated and it's killing people and ruining their lives. Will it still be killing people in ten years? Ebola and a few others threatened to do the same, but they never actually arrived.
It's hard for people who didn't live through it to really understand what a terrifying time the 80s and 90s were. First off, the general message of sexual education was pretty much "If you have sex, it's probably going to kill you." There's some hyperbole there, but not much. There was really no such thing as "sex-positive messaging", and even many years later it took me time to realize how much I had internalized "sex is a bad, dangerous thing". More importantly, though, is that an HIV diagnosis really was seen as a death sentence. If you're in your 20s, imagine a situation where tons of your friends had died, and there was an ever-present fear that you might be next. I honestly believe everyone who lived through that time in that situation has some level of PTSD.
So yes, there is still a lot to do as this article points out, but it is really amazing to see how far we've come. Even a lot of the issues pointed out in the article had less to do with technology and (honestly to my surprise) economic access than with shitty cultural practices (e.g. overall misogyny and men refusing to get tested). It's important to not lose vigilance, but I think it's also important to indulge in a moment of gratitude every now and then to all the warriors (both in the medical and research fields, and the many patients who lost their lives) who have accomplished so much for all of humanity.