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.
false sense of security (Score:3, Insightful)
i'd expect this to lead to a false sense of security, causing a rise in the casual encounter rate, followed rapidly by a huge growth in the infection rate.
but, i'm paranoid.
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Furthermore I would expect less people to get checked. Lower rates of detection and higher rates of unknown infection rates followed by even more infections.
This will only end badly.
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They came first to implant those who had Aids/HIV,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't Aids/Hiv positive.
Then they came to implant the Protesters of forced implanting,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Protester.
Then they came to implant those who were less than average,
and I did not speak out for I was well educated.
Then they came for me,
and by that time no one was left to speak up that hadn't already been implanted.
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If you want to keep a building secure, developing a white list of authorized people would be much easier, immediate, and practical, than trying to develop a black list of infected people who can't come in.
For this scheme to "somewhat" work, only the people that are *clear* of HIV would need to get implanted. Then periodically, the testing would have to be redone, the chip encryption/security model would have to be periodically upgraded, periodically re-implanted to keep up with the counterfeits, and at the
Think of the children (Score:3, Funny)
How is this goping to work .... (Score:3, Insightful)
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will they be installing everyone else with RFID readers>?
Eventually. The boiling frog may not work literally, but it makes a great metaphor.
Better solution (Score:2, Insightful)
Tattoo it to their genitalia. That way, nobody would know except for the people they deliberately tried to infect.
Re:Better solution (Score:4, Insightful)
Tattoo it to their genitalia. That way, nobody would know except for the people they deliberately tried to infect.
Unless they had an accident, needed surgery & the Doctors / Nurses refused to work on them?
I don't want to Godwin this thread early, but forcible tattooing [wikipedia.org] is really not a particularly civilised idea....
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No...if they had an accident, it would show the doctors that this person has AIDS, so proper precautions should be taken. Are you really suggesting that doctors be kept in ignorance of preexisting conditions?
I'm not arguing for the idea, but I just don't see that particular point...
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it would show the doctors that this person has AIDS, so proper precautions should be taken
As no system is foolproof, proper precautions should be taken with all patients.
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You just want to see someone getting dragged into a cop car yelling "Don't take my penis!" you sick freak.
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Genitalia??? Hell, tattoo it to their... (Score:1, Insightful)
...foreheads, not their foreskins. If an AIDS-infected person is being "sexually agressive", then everybody else around them deserves to be overtly warned about them.
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Portable testing (Score:5, Interesting)
A friend of mine once worked for a company that was making battery operated microarray testing units for the consumer market. Their plan was to sell them everywhere that condoms and pregnancy tests are sold. He claimed the unit could detect HIV/AIDS with 99% accuracy within just a few minutes. Apparently the USA, UK, Germany, Australia and France all banned the units before they even hit the market.. they were worried about discrimination against individuals with these diseases. They sell well in Africa and other countries, though only to doctors, and a positive result is always followed up with a lab test.
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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.
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In certain parts of Africa, the AIDS rate is quite high, which means that even 99% accuracy is still useful enough to use for preliminary screening.
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Yes, which is why it is being used in Africa and not in North America, Europe, etc.
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99% accuracy in a non-invasive, cheap test is quite enough for a screening test anywhere.
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Re:Portable testing (Score:5, Insightful)
99% is not good enough for something as rare as AIDS.
It completely depends on the way you use the information.
If you decide to forgo sex with anyone who shows a positive reading, whether a true or false positive, you've just cut down your rate of exposure by 99%. Sure that still leaves the other 1%, but as long as you don't take a negative reading as justification to have unprotected sex, you are no worse off than you would be without the tester.
Is everyone smart enough to use a test like that? No, but you can only do so much to cater to the stupidest people of society,I say the chances are those are the same people that would have unprotected sex anyway.
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Rubbish. Those who are diagnosed only represents a fraction of the total infected, and new infections are occurring daily - it is logistically impossible and 100% foolhardy to depend on this - scanning for a chip and finding none means nothing except that the person has not been diagnosed. Gravity existed well before it was "discovered" - HIV doesn't need a doctor and a chip to be in a host. Don't want HIV? Enter into a monogamous and long-lasting and committed relationship like marriage with proper testing
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Rubbish. Those who are diagnosed only represents a fraction of the total infected, and new infections are occurring daily
Gee, does this sound familiar to you?
"as long as you don't take a negative reading as justification to have unprotected sex, you are no worse off than you would be without the tester."
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Don't want HIV? Enter into a monogamous and long-lasting and committed relationship like marriage with proper testing. Oh, wait - I'm writing to the /* crowd - er, hook up in WoW and keep your real zipper zipped.
Why a monogamous, committed relationship? What if I have my entire harem tested for HIV and then forbid them contact with the outside world? Or I could have sex exclusively with virgins, or my own offspring. Or I could enter a polygamous or polyandrous relationship. What about bestiality? That sounds much safer considering adultery rates.
Ooh ooh ooh! I have a bright idea! I could practice safe sex and properly utilize a prophylactic, taking care not to exchange bodily fluids. Then I could sleep with
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If you're going to the effort of doing the awkward social negotiation of testing each other, you're perfectly capable of negotiating using a condom.
If you're in a social situation where you can't negotiate a condom (you're a woman who suspects her husband has been screwing around but know that if you suggest he use a condom he'll beat you for either suggesting he's screwing around or take it to mean you've been screwing around and beat you for that instead), then you're not going to be able to negotiate tes
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If you're going to the effort of doing the awkward social negotiation of testing each other, you're perfectly capable of negotiating using a condom.
Jeesus trees and forest man.
If the test comes back positive then you don't use a condom, you walk away.
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The bar-hopping scenario isn't the issue. A portable AIDS is almost irrelevant in a bar setting -- a person would be foolish to have unprotected sex with a stranger anyway, AIDS being only one possible issue.
A different issue would be employers who make their prospective hires or current employees take such a test, 1 out of 100 people (possibly falsely) terminated, slandered, lives turned upside down. Or an insanely jealous boyfriend who runs the test on himself after suspecting his girlfriend of cheatin
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A portable AIDS is almost irrelevant in a bar setting -- a person would be foolish to have unprotected sex with a stranger anyway, AIDS being only one possible issue.
The choice is not between unprotected sex and protected sex, it is between protected sex and abstinence.
Re: False positive vs negative rates (Score:2)
Agreed, the proportion of the population who are positive (as opposed to who test positive) is indeed an important factor in determining whether test accuracy levels are acceptable.
The suitability of a test also depends on the use you're putting the test to, and whether the false negative and false positive rates are the same.
For pre-screening, in order to avoid performing a more expensive test with a very low false positive rate, a false postive rate of 50% would still be fine - but the false negative rate
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It can get worse depending on the specifics. If it is strictly a problem of false positives and the test is cheaper than the more accurate test, it makes a great screening test. Say it costs $1 to do the screening test and $2 to do the real test.
Using only the real test you spend $2,000,000 to test your population. Withe the screening test, you spend $1,000,000 to screen everyone and $20,000 to do the real test on screening positives for a total of $1,020,000.
If the screening test is also faster of easier t
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This is probably the test kit [unilatex.com] that the parent talks about. Notice the actual number of subjects this device was tested on. And notice, that the testing was done by the company itself, and that its results haven't been published in a peer-reviewed journal as of yet, year 2008.
Then notice that in the US, we've had this type of quick testing device already available [fda.gov] since 2004. It has been approved for blood testing for HIV-1/2. And it has even been approved for saliva testing (at least for HIV-1, not HIV-2,
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You do know that pregnancy tests have only about a 97.4% accuracy, right? And that's not even taking into account the "oh my god I hope I'm not pregnant" users. They're pretty useful.
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http://archfami.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/7/5/465 [ama-assn.org]
Apparently 75% accurate when put in the hands of the common user.
Disconcerting; but unsurprising. (Score:5, Interesting)
AIDS really isn't unique in this, although it is perhaps the most dramatic case. There are all sorts of diseases that we could attack if we were willing to do some dreadfully unethical things. For the moment, we've mostly resisted the urge; but the danger is always there, just waiting for a bit more stress on the system.
I think you and I disagree on ethics... (Score:3, Insightful)
It is true that some people are innocent who have AIDS. However, these are the victims. It is a horrible chain reaction which may sentence several innocent people to death because of the irresponsible actions of a single individual.
Why would you fear an invisible chip whe
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When you have a non-trivial percentage of the population that still believes nonsense like "god sent AIDS to punish fags" and are profoundly ignorant about the transmission method (consider your serial killer example if people though serial-killer-ism was transmissible simply by being in proximity), that is a very real problem.
Re:I think you and I disagree on ethics... (Score:4, Insightful)
Good point, we should probably just chip everyone since it's invisible, small, and only licensed physicians can read it for privacy.
Your personal data will never be shared with anyone.
People with AIDS have rights too. We let people buy guns which can be used to kill people. We then punish them for it. I see no reason to fight Futurecrime in such a barbaric manner as tagging them.
Re:I think you and I disagree on ethics... (Score:5, Insightful)
Any other view would would be akin to a protecting a serial killer because you used to room with the guy and you're afraid of the social stigma.
Or we could just be protecting the witches, the anarchists, the commies, the blacks, the hippies, the Michael Bolton fans, and the AIDS patients because we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.
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Let's start with the Michael Bolton fans
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Revolvers with one bullet have a 15% chance of killing. AIDS carriers have a 1% or less chance of infecting someone through a single act of genital intercourse.
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Well, technically, the 5-shot revolvers are more common -- much easier to conceal.
More importantly, handgun shootings have about a 20% mortality rate statistically. That includes multiple shots, but I'll call it even, since your aim is likely to be better on average if you restrict yourself to AIDS-transmission distances.
We'll also assume (incorectly) that each cylinder has an equal chance of firing. In real life, the heavier cylinder with the bullet in it tends to wind up at the bottom, and the barrel te
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Why would you fear an invisible chip when you are innocent? If you do not intend to pass on this terrible disease which will take your life then why worry?
Because there are WAY too many people who would discriminate against an AIDS victim even when they are careful and present no risk at all, up to and including kill them outright (ironically creating a risk that wasn't there otherwise). In some places being indelibly marked as having AIDS could be a practical death sentence even if the mark requires a reader to 'see' it.
If a government wants to tag AIDS victims, it better be prepared to give them jobs and a body guard.
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Which is why I propose a small tattoo in a standard location near the genitals that is just a "+". Nobody will ever be able to see it unless they have to. It could be small enough to be unnoticeable from more than a few feet away.
(Yes, I know this is in some ways unethical and would go against the religious beliefs of some. I'm not sure I'd actually vote for such a measure, but I do think it's a better option than a technological solution that will likely turn into a major privacy liability.)
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I forgot to add that, as an added bonus, it's a great excuse for mutual oral sex prior to intercourse. "No, babe, I didn't just do a tattoo check! I wanted to put my head here!"
No Testing (Score:1, Insightful)
If this were to happen the amount of people who actually get tested for AIDS or HIV would drop. Just being marked like that would make people hesitate, and that is not something we want. I would rather have everyone get tested than have the number of people tested drop dramatically but know for sure those who did test positive have it.
Which is more ethical? (Score:4, Insightful)
Prior to the 1950s an epidemic to the magnitude of AIDS would have had those infected with it quarantined and provided with free medical care. That is free drugs, and a clean sterile environment so they could live as pain-free as possible.
Today we let them go about their business and charge them extravagant rates for medications which is beyond the ability of many to pay.
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Some countries, thankfully, do supply heavily subsidised medication. This helps protect the infected person AND those around them.
If yours isn't one of them, I guess you're probably from America or somewhere else in the Third World :-P
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This is cause for concern. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not a end-times Christian or a conspiracy theorist ( okay, a *sometimes* conspiracy theorist ), but I see this as a stepping stone to a path of complete control over the individual. If you can be electronically identified against your will at a distance, you lose a basic freedom not to be surveilled. You lose a fundamental right to privacy and anonymity.
If the power were in the hands of the individual -- say, I could remove the chip any time I wanted, I could identify anyone I wanted, I could know where the president was and who he was with at any time, then it would be a different story. But of course you can't remove the microchip -- that goes against the whole idea of the thing. To be monitored without your consent. It's power-over. If everyone were microchipped, we would live in a pan-opticon society, where our invisible overlords know our every move.
First it was pets, now it's dangerous disease-spreaders, next criminals and predators, after that children and elderly, in case they get lost, finally everybody, just to walk down the street and buy a drink at the corner store.
Don't get tested (Score:1)
Bad math can be deadly (Score:4, Insightful)
It would make the dating scene a lot less scary if you could carry your AIDS chip reader into the club.
It shouldn't. It would be extremely foolhardy to assume that all people infected with AIDS will be chipped. Hell, many people don't even know it themselves (yet). You would be no better off relying on a chip, or a tattoo because of the false negative effect. You still have treat everyone you meet as potentially infected.
The only thing this chip would do is make it easier to persecute the people who have sought medical help for their condition. One obvious side-effect will be that people who suspect they are infected will be reluctant to get tested in order to avoid the stigma of the chip. That's the same reason we have doctor-patient confidentiality - if you can't trust your doctor not to rat you out, then people will seek black-market treatments and the social health problem becomes worse over the long run.
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Speaking as someone who is paramedics-trained, chips listing HIV/AIDS and other REALLY dangerous diseases like Hepatit C etc, would make our lives a hell of a lot easier, both in reducing risk to ourselves, and to select appropriate methods.
There's nothing quite like trying to save someone and having a higher than necessary risk of contracting a deadly disease for it.
And to all the retards: Yes, deliberately avoiding to inform people of your status IS deliberately putting others at risk. And sexual transmis
Turkey shoot (Score:2, Informative)
I say to any potential overlords who want this... (Score:1, Insightful)
A worrying precedent... (Score:1)
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Being tagged as infectious IMHO is a good thing (provided they do some common sense groundwork first).
Get flagged as having a dangerous flu? Oh shit, your day is ruined. Well, I would think that if you're that hazardous and contagious, the public has a right not to be infected.
If you're sick enough to get flagged, you probably shouldn't be out in public in the first place.
Now mind you, there's a shitload of things that could go wrong. If they screw it up, it could cause chaos.
I think that if they can do
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I did say, that there's a shitload that can go wrong.
It goes without saying that a spotty civil rights record on the government doing the tagging is one of them.
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Is it too difficult to believe that I want people to be well? I believe there is a campaign of information supression. Bayer Asperin distributed AIDS tainted drugs to heymopheliacs in the US. When the FDA ordered them to sop, they distributed them for use in other countries.
Friend, I am indeed serious that we need to pay attention to the simple cures instead of the ones we have to pay pharma companies for.
From what I remember this was a tiny voltage trickle, not anything discomforting.
Sincerely,
Joseph Wi
Silly Indonesians (Score:2, Insightful)
Only after you stop the terrorists and save the children do you require it for AIDS patients, and senior citizens, and prisoners, and high school students. Then, you require it for "discounts" at the grocery store. That's where the irony starts, I suppose, when you need the chip to get a discount on a box of condoms, becaus
Fact Question about AIDS. (Score:1, Redundant)
I have a few questions I wanted to "fact check" about AIDS.
1. Most people who have AIDS are actually Heterosexual.
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.
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.
5. If AIDS were transferable through some oth
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
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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
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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 thos
Educated don't Alienate (Score:5, Insightful)
The stigma associated with HIV/AIDS is so great in Indonesia that many people who are infected with the disease refuse to seek medical assistance because they are too ashamed - I know because I am Indonesian and have met such people.
What the Indonesian government needs to work on is to remove the stigma of HIV testing and the use of condoms and to educate people about the disease.
Threatening HIV positive people with a chip implant will achieve exactly the opposite and instead and will simply put HIV positive people into hiding and make it that much more difficult to educate these people about how the disease is transmitted - think about people who believe that having sex with virgins heals you of HIV or the South African minister who admitted to having sex with an HIV positive woman but took a shower afterwards to reduce chances of infection - these are the exact same people who need to be educated and not alienated
Am I the only one.. (Score:1)
.. who read that as "modchip AIDS patients"?
All in context, my dear boy. (Score:1)
Many inhabitants of Papua come from rather primitive cultures and many of them reject modern science and medicine.
A native Papuan is far more likely to reject their diagnosis as the result of psychological dissonance than would an American or European.
They still sell chip implants? (Score:1)
It would be more sensible to whitelist (Score:1)
It might be more sensible to whitelist people who voluntarily have undergone a test lately for not having aids.
Blacklists always have to be kept up to date and the chip could be removed, and also it wouldn't be very popular to have one that tags you as a black sheep.
Everything would be easier for the authorities (Score:2)
if they just chipped us all.
I'll pass.
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To reiterate - USE A CONDOM DURING SEX. It will protect you from contracting hiv and has the added bonus of protecting against hepatitis, gonorrhoea, chlamydia etc. AND - it protects you even if your sexual partner is unaware of his/her STI:s.
When it comes to
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How do I get tested for immunity, and how many thousands of pounds can I charge for my marrow if I'm immune?
Long live capitalism!