Indonesians Want To Microchip AIDS Patients 120
Lawmakers in Papua, Indonesia have thrown their support behind a bill requiring some HIV/AIDS patients to be implanted with microchips in order to better monitor the disease. In addition, legislator John Manangsang said by implanting chips in "sexually aggressive" patients, authorities would be in a better position to identify, track and punish those who deliberately infect others. Health workers and rights activists sharply criticized the plan. It would make the dating scene a lot less scary if you could carry your AIDS chip reader into the club.
Re:Portable testing (Score:3, Informative)
99% is not good enough for something as rare as AIDS.
Pulling an informative selection from Cory Doctorow's book Little Brother:
Say you have a new disease, called Super-AIDS. Only one in a million people gets Super-AIDS. You develop a test for Super-AIDS that's 99 percent accurate. I mean, 99 percent of the time, it gives the correct result -- true if the subject is infected, and false if the subject is healthy. You give the test to a million people.
One in a million people have Super-AIDS. One in a hundred people that you test will generate a "false positive" -- the test will say he has Super-AIDS even though he doesn't. That's what "99 percent accurate" means: one percent wrong.
What's one percent of one million?
1,000,000/100 = 10,000
One in a million people has Super-AIDS. If you test a million random people, you'll probably only find one case of real Super-AIDS. But your test won't identify one person as having Super-AIDS. It will identify 10,000 people as having it.
Your 99 percent accurate test will perform with 99.99 percent inaccuracy.
That's the paradox of the false positive. When you try to find something really rare, your test's accuracy has to match the rarity of the thing you're looking for. If you're trying to point at a single pixel on your screen, a sharp pencil is a good pointer: the pencil-tip is a lot smaller (more accurate) than the pixels. But a pencil-tip is no good at pointing at a single atom in your screen. For that, you need a pointer -- a test -- that's one atom wide or less at the tip.
Turkey shoot (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Fact Question about AIDS. (Score:5, Informative)
Here's a quick rundown:
1. Most people who have AIDS are actually Heterosexual.
Globally, that's true. The vast majority of AIDS transmission in the 3rd World is via heterosexual sex. 2nd world transmission is primarily hetrosexual sex and IV drug use. 1st World transmission is IV drug use and Homosexual sex, though Heterosexual transmission is rapidly rising, and should overtake Homosexual soon.
2. AIDS is incurable, there is no vaccine, and treatment is generally painful and only delays the inevitable.
True, true, and false. We have no cure for an HIV-infected individual, and there is no vaccine. However, not all HIV-positive people develop AIDS, and there are striking effective theraputic treatments these days (though they're still enormously expensive). Like many other chronic diseases, even with proper anti-HIV meds, HIV reduces your lifespan noticably (to perhaps half of what you would have post-infection). Drug regimes are not painful, and HIV-positive people generally can lead full lives up until the terminal phase of the disease.
3. No one who gets AIDS ever survives it. It has a 100% kill rate.
Not really true. AIDS actually never kills anyone. In and of itself, it doesn't kill. What is does is destroy the immune system, which allows opportunistic diseases to take hold (deadly diseases which normally healthy people can easily resist). Thus, AIDS indirectly kills the host. So you can't really say that AIDS is 100% fatal, since there are a large number of factors determining when/if you get some sort of opportunistic infection.
4. While there are homosexual people who have AIDS, Homosexuality and AIDS are unrelated. However, religious groups attempt to connect AIDS to Homosexuality, when there is none.
Homosexuality does NOT cause AIDS. However, unprotected homosexual sex (e.g. anal sex) has a much higher risk factor than oral or vaginal sex, so the transmission rate for male homosexuals is significantly higher than the lesbian and heterosexual population. Unfortunately, the uneducated (or purposely evil) folks make this correlation-to-causation connection, which is false.
5. If AIDS were transferable through some other common method, such as water, or mosquitoes, and a large majority of the population, if not the entire population of the Human species, we would be extinct within a matter of a few decades.
Possible, but irrelevant. There are many factors involved in the spread of any contagious disease, and I won't pretend to be an epidemiologist. But, if you are looking for a roughly comparable deadly disease, look at malaria. It is nasty, and has many of the long-term implications as does AIDS, yet the human population has survived with malaria for several millenia, at the least.
-Erik
Re:Fact Question about AIDS. (Score:2, Informative)
2. AIDS is incurable, there is no vaccine, and treatment is generally painful and only delays the inevitable.
3. No one who gets AIDS ever survives it. It has a 100% kill rate.
True, true, partly true and totally FALSE.
True, hiv IS currently incureable (except for one recent case where the infected person had a bone marrow transplant and some other experimental treatment).
True, there is no effective vaccine against hiv.
True, antiretroviral therapy often causes side effects. But seldom painful side effects and in those cases it is often possible to change treatment.
However, the statement that "treatment only delays the inevitable" is FALSE.
Antiretroviral therapy stops hiv from replicating and if adhered to properly most patients get an improved immune system and can lead a normal healthy life. Even patients who have developed full blown aids can in many cases get an almost fully restored immune system after years of antiretroviral therapy. And those who don't usually improve the immune system so much that they don't die of aids-related illnesses.
Since the treatment only has been available since 1996 it is too early to definitely tell the long term outcome for sure, but all data indicates that most treated hiv-patients which do not have resistent virus should be able to have a normal life span if they adhere to the treatment.
I have met several hiv positive people who have developed aids and had seriously damaged immune systems who after 5-10 years of treatment now have almost normal lab counts and no hiv-related illnesses.
Re:Fact Question about AIDS. (Score:3, Informative)
HIV would not make humans go extinct. There are people that are completely immune to HIV. They are nearly impossible to identify because it's unethical to deliberatly infect someone and see if they get HIV. Even with the extreme difficulty in finding the people that are immune several have been identified that at one point had the virus in their blood then it disappeared, indicating they were immune and their body destroyed it. There was even a recent story about an HIV positive, AIDS patient that was given a bone marrow transplant from a person that exhibited immunity and had the virus disappear from their system leaving them HIV negative and making their AIDS go away.
As a result like any other disease if it became widespread and killed most of the population the human species would survive as those that are immune to the disease would simply live on and pass their immunity on to future generations neutralizing the virus threat to the species through natural selection. It's called evolution people and it's a reality.
Malaria hasn't wiped out the humanity in Africa because Sickle cell anemia is the result of two of the genes that prevent malaria. Those who have one of the genes are immune to malaria. Such is true of any disease that affects humanity, none are ever 100% fatal, even at 99.9999% fatal vast numbers (assuming 6.2billion and 99.9999% fatal 620,000 would survive) of people would be immune and survive.