So, If everyone with HIV/Aids dies,there would be no more HIV/Aids.

[maturin]

Your three possibilities are really stupid. I assume others have already pointed out why.

Only one is even possible.

And you should all be wearing condoms regardless of whether AIDs exists. There is worse stuff out there, rapidly becoming equally incurable.

 

[NaramSuen]

We all know that we should practice safe sex to protect from STDs.

Kids subjected to abstinence-only sex ed don't.

 

[billygoverton]

just echoing what some people have already said but,

when countries give out clean needles(UK), HIV numbers go down.
when teenagers have decent sex education, HIV numbers go down.
(I can find specific numbers if anyone contests, definitely researched the shit out of this topic for school.)

give out needles and condoms, and teach people how to use the latter.
condoms make the chances of getting a disease like this very small, but only if used correctly.

 

[RN7]

Your option C and your support is only feasible in 1st and some 2nd (yes, I don't use that "developing/developed" crap) countries. AIDS/HIV are mainly a problem in 3rd world countries, where people are either too uneducated to know how to prevent STDS (see Nigerian baby-raping a few years back as a result of several lower class men being led to believe that having sex with a virgin removes the diseases) or literally can't receive treatment because they're too isolated or too poor. Option A won't happen because the cycle will spread as long as they keep reproducing so...

 

[Von Strimmer]

Tell me time is the cure to HIV and AIDS when you get it.
Also, all diseases/viruses/etc. can survive without inhabiting humans. They can either be transmitted through animals, insects, or just be dormant on some kind of fungus. Or the disease/virus/etc. could just be a natural occurrence, i.e. it exists in nature as a plant's defence system, or an animal's digestive system.
The only way to completely be rid of any disease/virus/etc. is to exterminate every trace of it. Destroying the hosts might work, but is not entirely reliable.

This is not true for aids. Animals can get aids , but it's not the same type that affects humans , and it cannot be transmitted to humans.Now i'm not sure if say an animal or insect bites a person with aids and then bites another person without it, if the second person would contract it.

What about all the lions in Kruger National park? 90% of the lions there have feline aids because they have been eating refugees trying to make a break for the border.

Didn't HIV/AIDS burst onto the scene when they paved the Kinsasha highway in Africa? Pretty sure someone got jiggy jiggy with a monkey (or got poo thrown at him) and then it just spread from there.

You cant kill it, you just have to educate people in the ways of safe sex. You cant force people to not have sex or to commit suicide or anything like that to kill the disease.

 

[Korolev]

We need to develop a cure. First of all, HIV is no longer the threat it once posed. There are a variety of strains of HIV, and they are actually DECREASING in virulence and harmfulness, since the more deadly the strain, the higher the chances are that the patient would notice the symptoms sooner and refrain from having unprotected sex. They've extensively tracked this: the disease is becoming less dangerous in developed countries. And another reason why HIV is no longer that big a threat: We have effective therapies for curing/treating it. We can actually cure HIV now in babies or in people who were recently infected. For those who couldn't get effective treatment in time, we have a wide range of effective drugs that can treat the disease quite effectively - usually a HIV sufferer would die in 3 to 5 years after being infected. Now, a sufferer can live for.... well, who knows? HIV is no longer a death sentence for a lot of people. Plus, we have effective drugs that drastically reduce the transmissibility of the disease.

Second of all: Finding a cure would be valuable in and of itself. HIV is a very tricky virus - it mutates frequently and it can hide devastatingly well in your cells and lie dormant for years. Finding new and effective drugs to combat retroviruses will be very useful in researching cures for other retroviruses.

Third of all: Because it would be completely and horribly inhumane to just kill someone because they have a disease. Children born with HIV did nothing to deserve being born with that disease. They had no choice. People can also become infected through no fault of their own: Say their partner cheats on them, gets infected, and gives the disease to them? Or what about infected blood supplies? Tainted needles? HIV is a disease which can infect an awful lot of good folks who have done nothing to deserve it. Even those who have contracted the disease via life-style choices don't deserve to die. Plus, if you stigmatize them and force them to wear wrist-bands or get tattoos to indicate they have the disease (gee, I wonder what group of people that reminds me of?), that will just force newly infected people to NEVER get tested out of fear of being rounded up and segregated. You WOULD CAUSE MORE PROBLEMS by stigmatizing these people! It's absolutely the WORST thing you can do! If you come after them, they'll hide, but they won't stop having sex. They've done study after study on this: nations which DO NOT stigmatize HIV sufferers and do the most to HELP them have LOWER rates of HIV infection. Don't believe me? Compare Australia and Russia! In Australia, we HELP HIV sufferers. We try to find jobs for them. We don't stigmatize them. As a result, we have some of the lowest rates of infection in the entire world, adjusting for our population. But you go to Russia, where every HIV sufferer is treated like dirt, denied jobs, accused of being gay or a prostitute... and whadda ya know? Incredibly HIGH rates of infection!

By encouraging those with HIV to see a doctor, by not stigmatizing and threatening them, we allow them to get treatment and information on how to handle the disease. Scaring them, frightening them seems the obvious solution, but it's a dumb, dumb, DUMB thing to do. Trust me - every single viral pathologist, immunologist, doctor or studier of pandemics understands that with diseases like HIV, hitting the sufferers hardest is the absolute worst thing you can do.

It would also be barbaric.

 

[Von Strimmer]

Snip

Sorry, what? You realise that most of the AIDS epidemic happens in Africa, where Catholics condemn condoms and urge everyone to avoid them. AIDS can be transferred by saliva - kissing, essentially - and you can carry the disease without ever realising that you have it. There's no practical way to eliminate AIDS short of finding a cure, so yes, of course we should keep trying.

You would need to do a shit load of kissing to transfer HIV/AIDS. Even then you still wouldn't get it Also you cant transfer AIDS, only HIV is transferable

 

[Xanadu84]

1) You forget that people sometimes are born. Meaning that it is not a closed system. Meaning the virus can propagate at its current rate indefinitely. Neither a natural dying out nor complete infection of the globe is realistic.

2) Africa. Can you blame them for not having rigorous screening and highly organized resistance to this public health hazard?

3) After a person is exposed and before they have sex, all we have to do is stop people from having sex. This is totally realistic. How likely do you think you are to stop everyone from having sex? Because if, as policy, you make exceptions, a percentage of those exceptions will spread the virus.

4) So basically we quarantine. That thing that always works in zombie movies. Of course, AIDS is different. It is harder to detect, and therefore less likely to be successfully quarantined.

5) A cure is unlikely? In Thailand, there has already been tests with a marginally successful HIV Vaccine. Gamers recently helped unlock a protein protease that will help stop the Virus. Remember in the Mid 90's when AIDS was a death sentence? We have come increadibly far in a short time. Africa's economy is growing surprisingly fast, a major obstacle for breaking out of the third world and into higher standard of living. A Cure is quite feasible.

1) no i didn't forget that , i mentionned it in my wall of text , and this is true , but more people are infected with it by sex than that are born with it.
2) africa is there place where people die the most ( and fastest) due to aids , so it kind of balances out. Children sadly, already have a low chance of survivng after birth, and with aids it's worst.
3) what you say here is true , but with this logic ,the virus could not be stoped, ever. Because even if there is a cure , some people will remain ignorant to the fact they have the virus and keep spreading it.
4)also true , doubt we could effectively quarentine such a large number of people , plus those that have no idea they have the virus.
5)i did hear about this, advancements are being made , but it will take another several decades or so to make a cure that works 100% of the time , and even more time to completly erraticate the virus , due to the fact that the vaccine will have to be distributed in a enourmous scale. Making vaccines is a really tough and long process. Hopefully though , this would not be the case and we find a cure inthe near future , it would be best for everyone.

1) That's not the point. The point is that people being born means that the system is not closed, and therefore it doesn't have to be either eradicated or infect the entire planet. If on average 100 births occur and 1 person gets infected a day, then in the long run, 1 percent of the population will remain infected. If a virus grows too fast it will kill of entire populations and burn itself out, and if it grows to slow infection will get easier, so it can easily reach an equilibrium.

2) The problem is that by the nature of infection, a higher death rate accompanies a higher infection rate, and lack of screening means that by the time your life is threatened, you have been all the vector that you can be. Also, ignorance in Africa is actually not the problem that people think it is: People in Africa by and large are actually OVER-ESTIMATE the risk of HIV. If they have sex with a person with AIDS on accident, they assume they got it and give up, and have sex with other people with AIDS. People in Africa actually talk about sex quite a bit, and are fairly well informed. The This American Life episode on Gossip from a few months back covers this quite nicely.

3) Not really. You can, with a cure, drastically drop the infection rate and inoculate. This can decrease the problem to a level where preventitive care can deal the virus the killing blow. Virus's grow exponentially, but this also means that things that slow them down slow them down exponentially, until the point where it can be stamped out.

4) ...Yeah, no additional point.

5) Remember also that eradication may be a ways of, but drastically increasing the number of lives saved can happen in a much shorter timeframe.

 

[Torrasque]

Tell me time is the cure to HIV and AIDS when you get it.
Also, all diseases/viruses/etc. can survive without inhabiting humans. They can either be transmitted through animals, insects, or just be dormant on some kind of fungus. Or the disease/virus/etc. could just be a natural occurrence, i.e. it exists in nature as a plant's defence system, or an animal's digestive system.
The only way to completely be rid of any disease/virus/etc. is to exterminate every trace of it. Destroying the hosts might work, but is not entirely reliable.

This is not true for aids. Animals can get aids , but it's not the same type that affects humans , and it cannot be transmitted to humans.Now i'm not sure if say an animal or insect bites a person with aids and then bites another person without it, if the second person would contract it.

The virus can, and will morph, its always been like that for animals with viruses.
Point still stands: can't reliably kill the virus by killing it's hosts.

 

[AMMO Kid]

Edit: Nevermind, I don't want to deal with the shit storm that comes from this comment.

 

[Lilani]

-snip-

I guess we technically have previously accepted genocide as a viable solution to a problem (Iwo-Jima and Nagasaki), HIV originated from a disease that originally only infected monkeys and apes, called SIV. People who hunted local African wildlife would commonly get SIV, so it's believed that the disease mutated to affect humans from there. SIV still exists, which means we'd either have to find a cure for that, or just eradicate and/or quarantine all of the animals that have SIV or any other possible relative of it.

And also, we'd find a way to eradicate all loose blood and needles that possibly carry the virus just laying around.

So it's an interesting idea, but once you push passed the incredible moral implications, there are so many ways it can easily go wrong. And if/when that happens, all we'd have is millions of people and animals dead for basically no reason at all.

 

[FreeDoM.]

Chris Rock says it best.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=G7P4iFg048k

 

[Suicida1 Midget]

Lets say for one wild moment in which the planets alined and you were right. Then a drunk goes and fucks another monkey, nails his wife, gets a divorce, relies on hookers for a couple months, then gets remarried. And poof back to square one. The much more pratical choice is to find the cure.

 

[Thaluikhain]

In fact, I hear that there is actually a shamanistic belief circulated in Africa that, if you have HIV and have sex with several virgins, their purity will cleanse you of the disease and save your life.

Of course, we all know that such has the exact opposite effect. Whether this is actually a held belief and how widely it is held is not something I am an expert on, but if there ARE people who believe this think about how hard it would be to convince them otherwise...

"Yes, I know that your supposed cure is relatively easy, pleasurable, and risk-free from your perspective, but cold hard science says there is no possible way it will work. What? No. Science has no cure... we can keep you alive for quite some time with medication and sterile environments, but considering the quality of your drinking water and your inability to leave, your life expectancy is about five months. But still, you know, science is better."

In this case, it isn't even people being jerks or careless or unlucky, like it is in more developed countries. It's people with no chance to live desperately grasping at straws, trying to save their lives. And who can blame them (providing all's consensual, of course)?

Yeah, that's actually a belief that exists, leads to large amounts of rapes by HIV infected men of little girls, and, for similar reasons, albinos. Though, rape is a massive problem throughout all of Africa anyway.

It's really hard to convince people to 'take one for the team' when you haven't given them a jersey.

Oh, I like that line, I'm going to re-use that. Is it original?

 

[Guardian of Nekops]

It's really hard to convince people to 'take one for the team' when you haven't given them a jersey.

Oh, I like that line, I'm going to re-use that. Is it original?

As far as I know, it is. Barring the possible 'heard it years ago, forgot and regurgitated it,' thing the human brain is wont to do.

And feel free. ^^

 

[SidingWithTheEnemy]

I enjoy the slippery slope argument as much as the next guy, but the difference between the flu and aids is that one comes from just taking a walk in the rain, or simply being alive, while the other has to be contracted from someone who has it. So it doesn't really fit. There are other differences too, but that is the one that is relevant in this case.

Okay, so you don't like one of my examples, I'm fine with that, I provided others but if you don't like any of them go find yourself a better one... You have my support.

[hr]
1) AIDS (HIV and Stuff) like any other form of desease or virus infection doesn't only proliferate because of stupidity or carelessness.

2) Plagues have been used to win wars in the past and will always be used by mankind. We are such assholes, either go cry in the corner or deal with it.

3) Once you have the ability to search for a cure of a terminal illness you normally do that. Because yourself, or those close to you might be affected someday and because humans tend to have some moments compassion once or twice every millenia.

Oh and since some biggots really are convinced that AIDS is god's weapon against stupidity because only stupid people get it let's just go on step further and stop funding our educational system. Smart kids will likely learn how to read and write without the need of some flawed public institution while the rest of our stupid kids don't need that kind of treatment to know how to operate an AK47 for us.