Why does AIDS take preference over all other illnesses?
Offline Don't get me wrong folks, but I'm all for flooding Africa with condoms and gag all those fundies who feel otherwise.
But is this enough? No!!!! Billions of dollars are being spent on anti-retroviral drugs. Results of animal based vaccine trials have been abyssmal. But, more children in Africa die of malnourishment, malaria, diarrhea and community aquired pneumonias than the entire AIDS population there. Shouldn't financial resources be shifted to these other illnesses equally?
From a rational standpoint, AIDS is for the most part the result of unprotected intercourse among adults. And barring those who have aquired HIV through coercion (eg. rape, pedophilia, etc.) or via maternal-fetal transmission, it is by and large an illness that is the result of faulty decision making among consenting adults who have unprotected sex or who share needles for recreational drugs. How is this different from the following:
1. Driving without a seatbelt.
2. Drunk driving.
3. Eating burgers and fries causing coronary artery disease and stroke
4. Cigarette smoking
5. Getting syphilis, gonorrhea, hepatitis via unprotected sex
6. Being stupid and suffering the consequences
...and many more
Why shouldn't aquiring HIV be given the same weight as these other faulty human activities?
And we fine people who drive without a seatbelt!!!!
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the problem is all the things you mentioned are not prevelant here in the west. Those are things that can be cured over the counter( for the most part) whereas AIDS has no cure and it effects the population in the west so people in the west actually pay attention to it. You raise some valid points tho. I wouldnt mind seeing the stuff you mentioned get more done to fight them as well.
I see so many patients who suffered massive head trauma with resultant intractable epilepsy due to motor vehicle accidents from drunk driving.
Here are the stats for drunk driving:
Drunk Driving Statistics for the United States
Where is the cure for the head trauma sequelae (eg. epilepsy, severe cognitive deficits) that result from drunk driving? The solution to drunk driving just like having unprotected sex is sociocultural and not medications.
So based on my above points, how is aquiring incurable AIDS from unprotected sex different from aquiring an incurable consequence of head trauma from drunk driving? Why shouldn't these be treated equally?
you misunderstood me, i wasnt refering to the 6 points you layed out but to this sentence "But, more children in Africa die of malnourishment, malaria, diarrhea and community aquired pneumonias than the entire AIDS population there."
I guess i was focusing more on what was needed in Africa and less on here in the west...
Because "causes" are dealt with on a fad basis.
The focus on AIDS/HIV control on the African continent will fade once someone notices that African contries are looking at genetically engineered foods to bring relief from thier varied food production problems.
"Anyone can repress a woman, but you need 'dictated' scriptures to feel you're really right in repressing her. In the same way, homophobes thrive everywhere. But you must feel you've got scripture on your side to come up with the tedious 'Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve' style arguments instead of just recognising that some people are different." - Douglas Murray
Drunk driving can hurt people not involved - unless it's a case of rape, nobody has unwilling unprotected sex - drunk drivers can kill sober drivers and passengers.
Matt Shizzle has been banned from the Rational Response Squad website. This event shall provide an atmosphere more conducive to social growth. - Majority of the mod team
I'm largely in agreement with the Canadian medical professional of sub-continental origin who made the post, at least when it comes to making retrovirals and the rest available to Africa. HIV can't be fixed with modern drugs. It's that simple. The dough we fork over for medicine would be better spent on education and assassination of the occasional witch doctor spreading disinformation. I'm of the opinion that we should have a kind of international X prize for an AIDS cure. If pharmaceutical and vaccine producers aren't spending enough time and money on a working solution, then maybe we should offer the winner absolute tax free status, internationally, for a five year period following proof of development of a successful drug or vaccine that would be donated to the cause free of charge, no patents. With the money that somebody like Pfizer's making off of Viagra, the risk of dumping more down the R&D hole would be worth it for the reward.
"The whole conception of God is a conception derived from ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men."
--Bertrand Russell
DDA, that's the most rational thing I've ever heard regarding AIDS. It'll never happen for just that reason.
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If I may, IMHO, AIDs does and should take prevalence because it is very much tied to another grave problem:
Lack of education.
Consider it a building block. There is very little point (again, IMHO) of shipping-in vast quantities of genetically modified food to increase African farm yields so they can feed more people if they don't understand that fathering 10 or so children per parental couple will keep them in a perpetual state of starvation no matter what miracle foods good people like Norman Borlaug can breed. If we can get the rampant AIDs epidemic under some semblance of control, it will be a good indicator that we are succeeding in educating people and that the doors are being pried-open to the adoption of ideas like birth control.
There are also some monsters over in that particular region of the world, ensuring poverty and misery, that perhaps a lot of westerners & hard-line capitalists don't like to discuss that can only be resolved through education and an abandonment of barbaric prejudices/awakening to the 21st century in more ways than simply recognizing that a new line of assault rifles tends to be developed with each passing year. Yup. Gun running to warlords in places like the Sudan is a multi-million dollar business; between Soviet and Bloc country Cold War stockpiles and whatever the more bankrupt elements of NATO countries can scrounge-up of the latest and greatest brain-splattering hardware, people can make a mint in ensuring that Omar Jizz'Mouf can maintain a fleet of .50 cal toting Technicals and a few brigades of 10-15 year olds with AK-47s.
A great way to cause bigger problems would be to further empower such megalomaniacs with yet more agricultural resources before having brought a good portion of the population out of a bronze age mindset.
- Leon Trotsky, Last Will & Testament
February 27, 1940
*Blinks*
Uh. We already heave a medical cure for AIDs, though.
It's called a 'condom'.
More seriously, I thought there was some success with vaccines for HIV within certain strains or stages
EDIT: Oh, and more obviously, there's also the CCR5-32 mutation, which confers more or less total immunity to AIDs. This alone more or less guarantees, through the process of natural selection, that AIDs will always be limited in it's capacity to spread throughout the human population (until the virus itself mutates, of course).
...Hm. Upon cursory investigation, it also looks like Cre recombinase and Tre recombinas enzyme treatment has been demonstrated as a serious candidate for defeating the virus.
- Leon Trotsky, Last Will & Testament
February 27, 1940
As to a "reward" I can almost guarantee whoever finds a cure for AIDS will win the Nobel prize for medicine. If they are working for a pharmaceutical company at the time, they will likely get a HUGE bonus and any other pharmaceutical company, medical university or whatever would likely offer him or her huge ammounts of money and nearly anything else they would want to come work for them. If they aren't working for a pharmaceutical company, the latter still would be true and they would be offered a good percentage of profits for the right to produce it until a generic version is legal to make. Believe me, if someone discovers a cure they won't ever go hungry - not to mention the international fame, book deals, etc.
Matt Shizzle has been banned from the Rational Response Squad website. This event shall provide an atmosphere more conducive to social growth. - Majority of the mod team
That's not how drug development works, unfortunately. Any new product in your pharmacy is in all likelihood going to be the intellectual property of the stockholders of the company that produced it, not of one lone genius. For that matter there's phalanxes of lab technicians and people who run clinical trials and plenty of other people who are responsible for whatever treatment finally comes to market. My idea is based upon the frustrating tendency of drug companies to work on profit-oriented products for the first world rather than life-saving and life-improving products for the entire world. I'm not sure it would work, but I don't hold out hope that anybody in even a first rate academic university is going to give a cure for something as innocuous as Herpes, much less the viruses that make the third world the cess pool that it is.
"The whole conception of God is a conception derived from ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men."
--Bertrand Russell
Uh. Well then who the Hell is doing the enzyme R&D that I just read about? Or is that all just an elaborate hoax to keep the sheeple in line?
- Leon Trotsky, Last Will & Testament
February 27, 1940
"We accept that this approach is unlikely to be of immediate therapeutic use and that considerable obstacles would need to be overcome before an engineered recombinase could be practically used in any clinical setting. The most important, and likely most difficult, among these is that the enzyme would need efficient and safe means of delivery and would have to be able to function without adverse side effects in relevant target cells. Nevertheless, the results we present offer an early proof of principle for this type of approach, which we speculate might form a useful basis for the development of future HIV therapies."
From Sarker et. al, 2007. This is clearly not the announcement of a drug. It's the description of an impressive genetic technique. Transfecting HeLa cells in cell culture medium and transfecting cells in a live human being are different things. I'm not saying that this isn't impressive work, but using a cre recombinase to chop out DNA in E. coli has been going on since before HIV was identified as the etiologic agent of AIDS. It's a very promising technique, no doubt, but this one's going to need years of optimization, and that seems like a long shot to me in any case. For one thing, a virus that we know to mutate at relentless pace could very well simply mutate at the sites where it enters the host genome and defeat the site specific recombination mechanism by which cre recombination works; you're back at square one. For another, this would be the first time that we introduced an actual virus (as opposed to attenuated, "dead" viral particles in a vaccine) as a cure--the review boards will just love that idea, I'm sure. Hey, I hope it works and Africa rivals China as an industrial power by 2060 (no I don't, I hope the gorillas and elephants and lions take back over) but calling this a cure is very, very premature.
"The whole conception of God is a conception derived from ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men."
--Bertrand Russell