alt Hacker NewsI never thought about this.
So without concern for the humans with HIV* there an argument to be made that treating symptoms without curing made it spread more?
*obviously, this is just hypothetical. It’s important to care about the life of those with HIV. No banish them all to something like a leper-colony. Although it explains the logic for those at the time they existed better than a religious one did.
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There's a significant difference in the risk and mechanisms of transmission between these two viruses. The modern effective reproductive number for HIV is less than 1, about 30-50% lower than ebola in similar subsaharan countries [1][2]. You can get ebola from contact with an infected person's sweat during the active phase [3]. You can get it from their semen years after they have apparently recovered [4]. We don't have treatments that work in this longer term. The drugs that we do have are used during the active infection period to reduce the probability of death during the crisis. Folks are working on reducing the longer term infectiousness but it's a ways off yet [5]. We also don't have pre- or post-exposure prophylactic treatments for the medical workers who are at the highest risk of infection or the family members--the most common transmission mechanisms for ebola are home caregiving and contact with traditional burial practices. In this context of containing an active outbreak, quarantine is mostly helpful in reducing pressure on the medical system for a short term.
Compare this with HIV, which can be rendered untransmittable with modern treatments, which is primarily a sexually transmitted disease, which has pre- and post-exposure treatments. It's simply not very efficient/effective to exile millions of people with a lifelong latent infection and little risk of transmission.
The instinct towards ostracism of those who are perceived as unclean is some pretty primordial lizard brain shit which was a great rule of thumb two thousand years ago, along with wearing garments made of only one kind of material. It's actually actively harmful to the process of stopping infection. It leads to fear, distrust, and reduced reporting, hindering the medical system's ability to reach the people who most need to be reached, and encouraging the spread of superstition and suspicion of pre- and post-exposure treatments. In both diseases, the actual infection risk is modest compared to an airborne virus like COVID.
[1] https://journals.lww.com/jphmp/Abstract/2022/03000/Estimatin...
[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34189844/
[3] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4252165/
[4] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7875361/
[5] https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/73/10/1849/6168541?logi...
> So without concern for the humans with HIV* there an argument to be made that treating symptoms without curing made it spread more?
No, because HIV treatment is about killing the virus, and we don't have any that only treats the symptoms.
But there is an argument like that for the flu and colds.
HIV specifically targets the immune system. There's no way to just treat the symptoms.
The treatments we have now also decrease the risk of spread significantly.
It's a bit like the chickenpox. Once infected, you always have chickenpox ready to burst out in the future as shingles. But for the most part, it's dormant and you aren't infectious.
HIV treatment does the same. It doesn't clear your body of HIV, but it does decrease the HIV load to such low levels that it can be undetectable. That, in turn, decreases the likelihood you'll spread it.