Rare Cancer Seen In 41 Homosexuals (1981)

Re:Rare Cancer Seen In 41 Homosexuals (1981) by cdcox on Friday July 05, 2013 @01:37PM (#5995848)

It's not a direct comparison, but consider the handling of Ebola, where due to simple epidemiological interventions spread has basically been localized and stopped and no outbreak has killed more than 1000 people. Or consider the regular emergence of new flu strains which are far more contagious and are quickly and effectively contained. Though that comparison isn't great because we have a lot of knowledge when it comes to dealing with the flu.

My impression is (and I have not studied this) the failure in the HIV epidemic (pandemic?) wasn't a failure to develop drugs, it was a failure to perform basic epidemiological interventions to learn about and slow the progress of the disease.

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Re:Rare Cancer Seen In 41 Homosexuals (1981) by tptacek on Friday July 05, 2013 @01:55PM (#5995935)

In a sense this is a way of saying that in epidemiology, the failures are noisy and successes are silent, so comparing large epidemics across history might be misleading.

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Re:Rare Cancer Seen In 41 Homosexuals (1981) by brazzy on Saturday July 06, 2013 @02:06PM (#5999526)

the comparison makes no sense because the diseases are radically different. Ebola kills so quickly and is so infectious that it is self-limiting: patients die before they can spread it very far. Whereas AIDS patients can spread the disease for years, though it is as weakly infectious as as contagious disease can be.

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