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Seeing how much widespread PrEP (daily pill to prevent getting HIV) usage has led to an increased amount of unsafe sex makes me worry about the next 'HIV'. Too

by km3r 5y ago

Seeing how much widespread PrEP (daily pill to prevent getting HIV) usage has led to an increased amount of unsafe sex makes me worry about the next 'HIV'. Too many young people, specifically gay males, think as long as they are safe from HIV, they are safe enough. Unfortunately other STDs can have serious side effects, and in the long term can mutate into something more deadly. That being said, progress towards an HIV vaccine will clearly lead to less deaths than an increased amount of unsafe sex, and remains a noble goal. I just hope we as humanity can develop cures quicker than we can breed viruses. Watching covid varriants pop up worries me, but perhaps a quicker to production mRNA vaccine will allow us to remain ahead of it.

jupp0r 5y ago
Humanity has had lots of very unsafe sex for the last one million years and survived just fine. The risks are more to the individual than the species as a whole.
- ardit33 5y ago
  yep, and we got some stuff from the Neanderthals as well....
- Google234 5y ago
  Sure, I’m sure they enjoyed their life expectancy of under 30 years.
  - not2b 5y ago
    When life expectancy was 30 years, it was because many children didn't live past the first year; still, 70 year olds were common in hunter-gatherer societies.
    - contriban 5y ago
      Common doesn’t mean that most people made it. In a world where you can die for a cut, a hunter doesn’t last to be 70 very easily. This is one of those counter-myths that I’ve been seeing too often lately. The comment about dying early made sense: Just because we lived with unprotected sex for the last million years (and we changed genetically due to some viruses that we got along the way) it doesn’t mean that we’re now still willing to bear the consequences. I’m willing to bet that nowadays we have far more sexual partners than we’ve had since we started “society”
      - rejectedandsad 5y ago
        Seriously? The only person I know my age that’s getting laid is...married to his wife. Where is this moral panic coming from? If anything the new moral panic is young people aren’t having sex at all.
      - mensetmanusman 5y ago
        To your last point, it’s possibly not true if you track what is happening in Japan and now starting in the west. Many people can go their entire lives having the internet as their sole partner.
        contriban 5y ago
        I don’t think they’re a huge amount of people, at least currently. It looks like about 30% of Americans between 25 and 50 have never been married. That means at least 70% of that group has been married, more will marry in their lifetimes, and likely a large amount of people fornicate out of wedlock. That indicates that the vast majority of people has at least one sexual partner, with many having a lot more thanks to sexual liberation. For the record, I’m not saying that this is a bad thing at all. I was just alluding to the fact that we can’t compare life and expectations of safety to what it was even 100 years ago, let alone over “millions of years”
      - JohnWhigham 5y ago
        This is one of those counter-myths that I’ve been seeing too often lately. As opposed to people being ignorant about statistics and constantly parroting crap like "people only lived to 30 before modern medicine"?
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    Irrelevant - none of the STDs that have survived to this day and that also existed in prehistoric times would have been a major cause of death, except perhaps as complications in child birth.
- zarzavat 5y ago
  Humanity also didn't have widespread intercontinental travel for most of the past 1 million years. We all live in a single Petri dish now. A few thousand years ago humanity existed in many many isolated communities and was much more resilient to disease. Regular pandemics every ~10 years are very much a side effect of technology.
  - bawolff 5y ago
    I don't think that's true. Look at the death count by various years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics . Better health care seems to more than offset the extra risk from air travel.
    - zarzavat 5y ago
      Not only air travel. Sea travel. A thousand years ago there was an entire backup continent (the new world). And plenty of isolated communities were decimated when explorers came and brought alien diseases. Air travel just accelerated the process so that pandemics can spread within days rather than years and the effects can be seen in real time.
BugsJustFindMe 5y ago
> Unfortunately other STDs can have serious side effects You're not technically wrong. It's just that up until very recently the ones not preventable by vaccine (HPV, albeit stupidly expensive for men to get vaccinated for which of course means that men don't get vaccinated for it) were mostly immediately obvious and always easily solved by a single dose of antibiotics (basically everything except HIV, HPV, and herpes, which isn't life threatening). Our impending antibiotic resistant apocalypse is of course terrifying.
- Frost1x 5y ago
  >Our impending antibiotic resistant apocalypse is of course terrifying. This is my main concern. We as a species seem to always be so sure we can engineer our way out of a catastrophe by focusing on reaction to problems vs prevention of problems and always pass costs to the future. I'm all for keeping reactive skills top notch but we need to think about simple and easy preventative measures. The HPV vaccine reference is a great example. Men should also get vaccinated as a preventative measure but we play it off as too costly or low risk. Men partaking in anal sex can get HPV and not even know it, sometimes leading to penis or colon/anal cancer later in life. It's especially bad because men will likely go long periods of time completely unaware of such an infection. We vaccinate young girls because we know they're all at risk but we often don't vaccinate young men because we don't know who will or won't end up having anal sex and culturally assume men are somehow invulnerable to it because of it.
  - morbia 5y ago
    I presume this is in the US? In the UK for example the HPV vaccine for gay men is free on the NHS. I'm sure the same is true for many other countries too.
    - makomk 5y ago
      If I remember rightly, the US does routinely vaccinate everyone against HPV as teenagers regardless of gender - it's the UK that historically only vaccinated girls. (Though this changed very recently, it obviously still leaves a bunch of men unvaccinated.) There's some kind of recent vaccination program for gay men, but that only started a couple of years ago and requires them to actively seek out vaccination.
tedk-42 5y ago
I worry that you're worried about a group of people freely participating in activities that could lead to further mutations of viruses that could spread to people. It's a bit of paranoia and maybe even unconscious bias against the group mentioned you're not aware of. Heterosexual unsafe sex is just as likely to lead to virus mutations and it's certainly a higher proportion of the population, yet you choose to point out gay males in particular?
- anotherv 5y ago
  I've never known a woman to take prep that isn't a sex worker. Where as I know plenty's of gay blokes do. Maybe drop the gay card..
  - BugsJustFindMe 5y ago
    This appears to be a discussion about the dangers of rampant unsafe sex, not about prep. I know tons of straight men and women who have unsafe sex.
- delecti 5y ago
  It's vastly less likely to transmit HIV to the penetrative partner, so the fact that it's possible for gay males to perform both roles makes it more likely to spread. It's oversimplifying, but it's not wildly off base.
  - anotherv 5y ago
    You are letting the facts get in the way here of a "cause"
  - girvo 5y ago
    Right, but isn't this dicussion about _other_ viruses, not HIV (due to PrEP)?
    - hsbauauvhabzb 5y ago
      The same could be said for the pill and heterosexuals, no?
jxramos 5y ago
this is interesting, so you're saying producing something like a "super STD" much like how antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria, ie superbugs, are bred in hospitals for example. So in this petridish of unprotected sex we create the conditions for the formation super STDs?
- BugsJustFindMe 5y ago
  Drug resistant STIs are not just hypothetical anymore. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/multi-drug-resistant-gonorrhoea https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/multi-drug-... I guess maybe it's not widely known, but half of STIs are bacterial, so antibiotic resistance is exactly the thing people are worried about.
- bawolff 5y ago
  I don't think it works that way. Why would unprotected sex lead to super-std's? People getting a cold on a regular basis dont generally lead to super-colds. You of course may get drug resistence in std's just like other non-sexual infections, but im not sure why the emphasis on unprotected sex.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - BugsJustFindMe 5y ago
    > im not sure why the emphasis on unprotected sex Probably just because the thread context is a rise in unprotected sex and a coincident rise in STI transmission.
  - jxramos 5y ago
    it's a good question, I always thought STDs were more infectious just because their direct route of transmission into the body with the large mucous bodies that are involved. Thinking about that recent term that's come up in COVID with viral load, it seems like with an STD you're opening the doors to a direct viral/bacterial load punch unlike the diffuse air transmission routes that drop like a mold spore and have to reproduce. I'm curious now when it comes to STDs is there any way to quantify just how much concentration/load shows up in body fluids and how potent the infectiousness would be for those fluids given that concentration. But now that I think about it, I'm curious which cavities in the body present the widest mucosal surface areas if you cut and open them up and measure them. The pharynx, the throat, the anus and colons, the urethra, the vagina cervix and uterus, how do each of those measure out. I've heard the colon is susceptible to infection because of the large network of lymphatic tissue just on the otherside and because it's designed to absorb stuff being the last mile of the digestive tract where traces of anything left behind at that final stage and still useful can be absorbed by the body. The application of suppositories come to mind in this space. Another angle might connect with the point brought up by the other individual about bacteria being a frequent origin of STDs, and bacteria generally share genetic material from what I understand. Maybe that bacteria to bacteria mingling is where the risk comes in?
bawolff 5y ago
> I just hope we as humanity can develop cures quicker than we can breed viruses Both HIV and COVID came from animal hosts originally. They weren't "bread" by humans. > Watching covid varriants pop up worries me, but perhaps a quicker to production mRNA vaccine will allow us to remain ahead of it. Well its possible that covid will mutate to escape the vaccine, its hardly a sure thing and hasn't happened yet (variants dont matter much if existing vaccines take care of them). Its entirely possible that new mRNA vaccines not only would be fast enough, but that we will never actually need them at all.
- echelon 5y ago
  > Both HIV and COVID came from animal hosts originally. The jury is out on COVID. We don't know.
  - not2b 5y ago
    Even if it was a lab leak it was still probably of animal origin (the Wuhan lab collected and studied coronaviruses from bats).
  - GuB-42 5y ago
    We know with extremely high probability. It is genetically very close to bat coronaviruses. It is also not the first. Furthermore, a zoonotic coronavirus pandemic was already on the "Disease X" list, so it wasn't completely unexpected. What we don't know yet is how it jumped from bats to humans. Is it direct? Is there an intermediate host? (pangolin?) The more reasonable conspiracy theory is that the virus escaped from the Wuhan lab, possibly as a result of gain of function experiments. But originally, it is still bats, and what they could have done is not something nature is incapable of.
    - covidlab 5y ago
      The lab leak theory isn't a conspiracy theory, and it's rapidly looking like that's actually what happened. So no, we don't know that it came from an animal naturally with "extremely high probability," just like early in the pandemic we "knew" it was spread by droplets, but it wasn't, and we "knew" lockdowns would help, but we didn't. C'mon, man, tell me to trust the fucking science! I dare you! Your bat theory is the hair brained conspiracy theory, peddled by tabloids like CNN because the Trump admin liked the lab leak theory and they didn't like Trump. Give me a fucking break, I'm so tired of the condescension, the "extremely high probability" of everything passed down by lay believers like you during this whole crappy ordeal. Everything that supports your policy positions is something true with "extremely high probability" Holy fuck I'm so annoyed, I just spent several hours fully vaccinated wearing a pointless mask in an airport because of people like you that treat medical experts and tabloids like witch doctors and believe their every word without ever turning your puny smooth brain on for a fucking second It was a lab leak, and it probably came from an NIH funded study backed and promoted by Chief Moron Dr Tony Fauci who should have been fired for lying to the public for political reasons over a year ago I fucking hate this website. You people deserve n-gate.com, you know-it-all Silicon Valley appealing-to-authority morons, I hope you all get stuck in California when the economy there finally keels over
deleted 5y ago
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jboydyhacker 5y ago
First of all, the most dangerous word in the world is "safe"- there is no such thing. It's an illusion. You are not safe, you will get sick and die one day. We all will. Also, people have been having "unsafe" sex for over 40,000 years. There's been gay unsafe sex and straight unsafe sex going on all that time. I'm not sure how we all made it.
- asveikau 5y ago
  > I'm not sure how we all made it. I am not a scientist or any kind of expert. But I thought I read somewhere that there are some ape species for whom SIV is endemic and harmless. Others get sick and die. So maybe it just takes time for a species to adapt and it's very deadly right now because humans haven't been exposed for very long.
  - bawolff 5y ago
    A lot of deadly diseases become deadly by crossing the species barrier. Long term its a better survival strategy to not kill your host.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  "We" are subject to survivorship bias. Plenty of people did not make it and their bloodlines are long extinct. The difference between Stone Age and today is that our civilization managed to conquer most really serious risks that used to shorten the lives of people under, say, 70. Famines, unsafe water, most bacterial diseases are well under control. So, of course, the roster of threats now changed, some of them being civilizational (road accidents), some of them being relatively small holdovers from the ancient days, such as STDs, plus the very aging that makes our mortality curves shoot up in the old age. But yes, realistically, people are going to bareback one another all the time. Which means that vaccines and cures for whatever bug is transmitted like that are necessary.
m-p-3 5y ago
There's no way around that issue, it all stems from education and awareness.
SaberTail 5y ago
There's a wonderful book called No Magic Bullet by Allan M. Brandt that discusses how rates of syphilis and other STIs rose after there were effective treatments. To your comment, I'd at least say there's evidence that treatments to previous STI epidemics hasn't caused the downfall of humanity, and so a vaccine or treatment for HIV/AIDS likely won't either.
- Turing_Machine 5y ago
  Treatments and vaccines are different, though.
  - Turing_Machine 5y ago
    In specific, you can get syphilis again after being treated for it, while a vaccine normally confers permanent immunity.
- KMag 5y ago
  Does the book account for the effect of more people undergoing testing once there was an effective treatment? If there's no effective treatment, testing mostly benefits others.
01100011 5y ago
We'll cure those too. Rather than worrying about that scenario, I'd rather consider what the world will be like when there are no STDs. It's certainly more amusing than fretting about something that has already happened(super-variants of run of the mill STDs). As an aside, I wonder what role STDs played in the development of religion and the religious superstitions surrounding sex. Can monogamy survive in the long-term in a world without consequences to promiscuity?
- Valgrim 5y ago
  What do you mean by can monogamy survive? Do you mean that in a world without STDs it would be abnormal for someone to expect an intimate relationship to be exclusive?
  - Frost1x 5y ago
    The intimate relationship is one component of monogamy, there's also having a steady nearly guaranteed sexual partner with low risks. Ideally you're both monogamous so unless one had STIs before entering the relationship, it's incredibly unlikely either would acquire one and almost certainly not from intercourse but through some other means. There are people more interested in the low risk stable sexual benefits of a trustworthy monogamous relationship. I personally doubt it's more than the number of people wanting an intimate relationship beyond sex though.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - justinator 5y ago
      The intimate relationship is one component of monogamy It's certainly not exclusive to monogamy.
    - Cthulhu_ 5y ago
      To add, relationships are not only about sex or a sexual partner. The emphasis in a proper relationship is on the partner part, not the sex part.
jliptzin 5y ago
People are going to have unsafe sex for the entirety of human existence, period. Even during the height of the HIV epidemic in the 80s they were still doing it. We should accept that truth and work now to be prepared for the next pandemic. If you insist on people using condoms just in case a novel virus is circulating, then we should all be wearing masks too at all times well into the future. Respiratory viruses can be just as bad as sexually transmitted ones.
tsimionescu 5y ago
HIV didn't come about because of unsafe sex, it was a freak accident involving blood. And as far as I can tell, in the history of modern humans there have been three STDs that have been life-threatening: Siphilis, HPV and HIV. So I wouldn't worry too much. Remeber that unsafe sex is the natural norm, especially if you don't have to worry about unwanted pregnancy (as in the case of gay people). Safe sex only truly became a necessity because of HIV, an extremely recent phenomenon.
Draken93 5y ago
"Too many young people, specifically gay males" Do you have any data to support this allegation?
- vineyardmike 5y ago
  Not OP, and generally don't agree with their point, but this passes the general sanity test. Considering PREP is targeted almost exclusively to gay men, and HIV is mostly a concern among the sexually active gay male population, saying "young, gay, men" is pretty fitting. Obviously the value-judgement about how much sex is too much or too risky can't have data to back this up. To me, as long as there is a net reduction in risky behavior that might impact society (not spreading a disease faster than eradicating it), its probably good, but this doesn't seem to be OP's view.
  - Draken93 5y ago
    I should have cited the whole sentence. I do not want to discuss a higher incidence of HIV in the group of gay males compared to the whole population. That is a fact that is attributable to the fact that unprotected anal sex comes with a higher infection risk then unprotected vaginal sex. But the OP claimes that "specifically [young] gay males think as long as they are safe from HIV, they are safe enough." That may be the result of unfortunate wording. But if not it is an allegation that the OP will have a very hard time to prove.
vineyardmike 5y ago
> makes me worry about the next 'HIV'. Too many young people, specifically gay males, think as long as they are safe from HIV, they are safe enough. So, first off, you might have a valid point but your approach sounds pretty biased. The wild generalizations about behavior, especially stigmatized behavior from a marginalized group, detracts from point about concern over a super-virus. Yes, gay men are often the topic of convo when it comes to HIV but it's not like they're the only ones passing around STDs. Also, I'm not sure its true that Prep has had a material increase in unsafe sex. Most gay men seem to think of it more as a means to not worry about dying from sex instead of an opportunity to dramatically change behavior. Thanks in-part to HIV gay men are probably also the population with the best insight into their sexual health - so if a concerning new STD did spread, they'd be the first to take the individual responsibility to stay regularly tested and informed. Birth-control and abortion and other related tools likely had a similar affect on heterosexual sex that prep had on gay men. There is a lot more heterosexual people to pass things around too. So calling out gay men might not be the most important piece to your worry about promiscuity leading to a super-virus. Prep-induced gay promiscuity inducing a new pandemic of super-STDs really sounds like a bad talking point for an extremist politician in a conservative country. Obviously, its possible, however improbable, but its probably not the best way to express this concern.
toper-centage 5y ago
While I agree with you, the truth is that among gay men, the use of condoms was already in sharp decline despite HIV, and before PrEP being so ubiquitous years ago. So while this medicine might have made people forgo condoms faster, it also came at the right time to prevent youths from a life with HIV. Furthermore, each new PrEP prescription (prepscription?) requires tests for a series of common STIs so at least guys are getting tested regularly now.

by km3r 5y ago

jupp0r 5y ago

Humanity has had lots of very unsafe sex for the last one million years and survived just fine. The risks are more to the individual than the species as a whole.

ardit33 5y ago
yep, and we got some stuff from the Neanderthals as well....
Google234 5y ago
Sure, I’m sure they enjoyed their life expectancy of under 30 years.
- not2b 5y ago
  When life expectancy was 30 years, it was because many children didn't live past the first year; still, 70 year olds were common in hunter-gatherer societies.
  - contriban 5y ago
    Common doesn’t mean that most people made it. In a world where you can die for a cut, a hunter doesn’t last to be 70 very easily. This is one of those counter-myths that I’ve been seeing too often lately. The comment about dying early made sense: Just because we lived with unprotected sex for the last million years (and we changed genetically due to some viruses that we got along the way) it doesn’t mean that we’re now still willing to bear the consequences. I’m willing to bet that nowadays we have far more sexual partners than we’ve had since we started “society”
    - rejectedandsad 5y ago
      Seriously? The only person I know my age that’s getting laid is...married to his wife. Where is this moral panic coming from? If anything the new moral panic is young people aren’t having sex at all.
    - mensetmanusman 5y ago
      To your last point, it’s possibly not true if you track what is happening in Japan and now starting in the west. Many people can go their entire lives having the internet as their sole partner.
      - contriban 5y ago
        I don’t think they’re a huge amount of people, at least currently. It looks like about 30% of Americans between 25 and 50 have never been married. That means at least 70% of that group has been married, more will marry in their lifetimes, and likely a large amount of people fornicate out of wedlock. That indicates that the vast majority of people has at least one sexual partner, with many having a lot more thanks to sexual liberation. For the record, I’m not saying that this is a bad thing at all. I was just alluding to the fact that we can’t compare life and expectations of safety to what it was even 100 years ago, let alone over “millions of years”
    - JohnWhigham 5y ago
      This is one of those counter-myths that I’ve been seeing too often lately. As opposed to people being ignorant about statistics and constantly parroting crap like "people only lived to 30 before modern medicine"?
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  Irrelevant - none of the STDs that have survived to this day and that also existed in prehistoric times would have been a major cause of death, except perhaps as complications in child birth.
zarzavat 5y ago
Humanity also didn't have widespread intercontinental travel for most of the past 1 million years. We all live in a single Petri dish now. A few thousand years ago humanity existed in many many isolated communities and was much more resilient to disease. Regular pandemics every ~10 years are very much a side effect of technology.
- bawolff 5y ago
  I don't think that's true. Look at the death count by various years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics . Better health care seems to more than offset the extra risk from air travel.
  - zarzavat 5y ago
    Not only air travel. Sea travel. A thousand years ago there was an entire backup continent (the new world). And plenty of isolated communities were decimated when explorers came and brought alien diseases. Air travel just accelerated the process so that pandemics can spread within days rather than years and the effects can be seen in real time.

BugsJustFindMe 5y ago

> Unfortunately other STDs can have serious side effects You're not technically wrong. It's just that up until very recently the ones not preventable by vaccine (HPV, albeit stupidly expensive for men to get vaccinated for which of course means that men don't get vaccinated for it) were mostly immediately obvious and always easily solved by a single dose of antibiotics (basically everything except HIV, HPV, and herpes, which isn't life threatening). Our impending antibiotic resistant apocalypse is of course terrifying.

Frost1x 5y ago
>Our impending antibiotic resistant apocalypse is of course terrifying. This is my main concern. We as a species seem to always be so sure we can engineer our way out of a catastrophe by focusing on reaction to problems vs prevention of problems and always pass costs to the future. I'm all for keeping reactive skills top notch but we need to think about simple and easy preventative measures. The HPV vaccine reference is a great example. Men should also get vaccinated as a preventative measure but we play it off as too costly or low risk. Men partaking in anal sex can get HPV and not even know it, sometimes leading to penis or colon/anal cancer later in life. It's especially bad because men will likely go long periods of time completely unaware of such an infection. We vaccinate young girls because we know they're all at risk but we often don't vaccinate young men because we don't know who will or won't end up having anal sex and culturally assume men are somehow invulnerable to it because of it.
- morbia 5y ago
  I presume this is in the US? In the UK for example the HPV vaccine for gay men is free on the NHS. I'm sure the same is true for many other countries too.
  - makomk 5y ago
    If I remember rightly, the US does routinely vaccinate everyone against HPV as teenagers regardless of gender - it's the UK that historically only vaccinated girls. (Though this changed very recently, it obviously still leaves a bunch of men unvaccinated.) There's some kind of recent vaccination program for gay men, but that only started a couple of years ago and requires them to actively seek out vaccination.

tedk-42 5y ago

I worry that you're worried about a group of people freely participating in activities that could lead to further mutations of viruses that could spread to people. It's a bit of paranoia and maybe even unconscious bias against the group mentioned you're not aware of. Heterosexual unsafe sex is just as likely to lead to virus mutations and it's certainly a higher proportion of the population, yet you choose to point out gay males in particular?

anotherv 5y ago
I've never known a woman to take prep that isn't a sex worker. Where as I know plenty's of gay blokes do. Maybe drop the gay card..
- BugsJustFindMe 5y ago
  This appears to be a discussion about the dangers of rampant unsafe sex, not about prep. I know tons of straight men and women who have unsafe sex.
delecti 5y ago
It's vastly less likely to transmit HIV to the penetrative partner, so the fact that it's possible for gay males to perform both roles makes it more likely to spread. It's oversimplifying, but it's not wildly off base.
- anotherv 5y ago
  You are letting the facts get in the way here of a "cause"
- girvo 5y ago
  Right, but isn't this dicussion about _other_ viruses, not HIV (due to PrEP)?
  - hsbauauvhabzb 5y ago
    The same could be said for the pill and heterosexuals, no?

jxramos 5y ago

this is interesting, so you're saying producing something like a "super STD" much like how antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria, ie superbugs, are bred in hospitals for example. So in this petridish of unprotected sex we create the conditions for the formation super STDs?

BugsJustFindMe 5y ago
Drug resistant STIs are not just hypothetical anymore. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/multi-drug-resistant-gonorrhoea https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/multi-drug-... I guess maybe it's not widely known, but half of STIs are bacterial, so antibiotic resistance is exactly the thing people are worried about.
bawolff 5y ago
I don't think it works that way. Why would unprotected sex lead to super-std's? People getting a cold on a regular basis dont generally lead to super-colds. You of course may get drug resistence in std's just like other non-sexual infections, but im not sure why the emphasis on unprotected sex.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- BugsJustFindMe 5y ago
  > im not sure why the emphasis on unprotected sex Probably just because the thread context is a rise in unprotected sex and a coincident rise in STI transmission.
- jxramos 5y ago
  it's a good question, I always thought STDs were more infectious just because their direct route of transmission into the body with the large mucous bodies that are involved. Thinking about that recent term that's come up in COVID with viral load, it seems like with an STD you're opening the doors to a direct viral/bacterial load punch unlike the diffuse air transmission routes that drop like a mold spore and have to reproduce. I'm curious now when it comes to STDs is there any way to quantify just how much concentration/load shows up in body fluids and how potent the infectiousness would be for those fluids given that concentration. But now that I think about it, I'm curious which cavities in the body present the widest mucosal surface areas if you cut and open them up and measure them. The pharynx, the throat, the anus and colons, the urethra, the vagina cervix and uterus, how do each of those measure out. I've heard the colon is susceptible to infection because of the large network of lymphatic tissue just on the otherside and because it's designed to absorb stuff being the last mile of the digestive tract where traces of anything left behind at that final stage and still useful can be absorbed by the body. The application of suppositories come to mind in this space. Another angle might connect with the point brought up by the other individual about bacteria being a frequent origin of STDs, and bacteria generally share genetic material from what I understand. Maybe that bacteria to bacteria mingling is where the risk comes in?

bawolff 5y ago

> I just hope we as humanity can develop cures quicker than we can breed viruses Both HIV and COVID came from animal hosts originally. They weren't "bread" by humans. > Watching covid varriants pop up worries me, but perhaps a quicker to production mRNA vaccine will allow us to remain ahead of it. Well its possible that covid will mutate to escape the vaccine, its hardly a sure thing and hasn't happened yet (variants dont matter much if existing vaccines take care of them). Its entirely possible that new mRNA vaccines not only would be fast enough, but that we will never actually need them at all.

echelon 5y ago
> Both HIV and COVID came from animal hosts originally. The jury is out on COVID. We don't know.
- not2b 5y ago
  Even if it was a lab leak it was still probably of animal origin (the Wuhan lab collected and studied coronaviruses from bats).
- GuB-42 5y ago
  We know with extremely high probability. It is genetically very close to bat coronaviruses. It is also not the first. Furthermore, a zoonotic coronavirus pandemic was already on the "Disease X" list, so it wasn't completely unexpected. What we don't know yet is how it jumped from bats to humans. Is it direct? Is there an intermediate host? (pangolin?) The more reasonable conspiracy theory is that the virus escaped from the Wuhan lab, possibly as a result of gain of function experiments. But originally, it is still bats, and what they could have done is not something nature is incapable of.
  - covidlab 5y ago
    The lab leak theory isn't a conspiracy theory, and it's rapidly looking like that's actually what happened. So no, we don't know that it came from an animal naturally with "extremely high probability," just like early in the pandemic we "knew" it was spread by droplets, but it wasn't, and we "knew" lockdowns would help, but we didn't. C'mon, man, tell me to trust the fucking science! I dare you! Your bat theory is the hair brained conspiracy theory, peddled by tabloids like CNN because the Trump admin liked the lab leak theory and they didn't like Trump. Give me a fucking break, I'm so tired of the condescension, the "extremely high probability" of everything passed down by lay believers like you during this whole crappy ordeal. Everything that supports your policy positions is something true with "extremely high probability" Holy fuck I'm so annoyed, I just spent several hours fully vaccinated wearing a pointless mask in an airport because of people like you that treat medical experts and tabloids like witch doctors and believe their every word without ever turning your puny smooth brain on for a fucking second It was a lab leak, and it probably came from an NIH funded study backed and promoted by Chief Moron Dr Tony Fauci who should have been fired for lying to the public for political reasons over a year ago I fucking hate this website. You people deserve n-gate.com, you know-it-all Silicon Valley appealing-to-authority morons, I hope you all get stuck in California when the economy there finally keels over

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jboydyhacker 5y ago

First of all, the most dangerous word in the world is "safe"- there is no such thing. It's an illusion. You are not safe, you will get sick and die one day. We all will. Also, people have been having "unsafe" sex for over 40,000 years. There's been gay unsafe sex and straight unsafe sex going on all that time. I'm not sure how we all made it.

asveikau 5y ago
> I'm not sure how we all made it. I am not a scientist or any kind of expert. But I thought I read somewhere that there are some ape species for whom SIV is endemic and harmless. Others get sick and die. So maybe it just takes time for a species to adapt and it's very deadly right now because humans haven't been exposed for very long.
- bawolff 5y ago
  A lot of deadly diseases become deadly by crossing the species barrier. Long term its a better survival strategy to not kill your host.
inglor_cz 5y ago
"We" are subject to survivorship bias. Plenty of people did not make it and their bloodlines are long extinct. The difference between Stone Age and today is that our civilization managed to conquer most really serious risks that used to shorten the lives of people under, say, 70. Famines, unsafe water, most bacterial diseases are well under control. So, of course, the roster of threats now changed, some of them being civilizational (road accidents), some of them being relatively small holdovers from the ancient days, such as STDs, plus the very aging that makes our mortality curves shoot up in the old age. But yes, realistically, people are going to bareback one another all the time. Which means that vaccines and cures for whatever bug is transmitted like that are necessary.

m-p-3 5y ago

There's no way around that issue, it all stems from education and awareness.

SaberTail 5y ago

There's a wonderful book called No Magic Bullet by Allan M. Brandt that discusses how rates of syphilis and other STIs rose after there were effective treatments. To your comment, I'd at least say there's evidence that treatments to previous STI epidemics hasn't caused the downfall of humanity, and so a vaccine or treatment for HIV/AIDS likely won't either.

Turing_Machine 5y ago
Treatments and vaccines are different, though.
- Turing_Machine 5y ago
  In specific, you can get syphilis again after being treated for it, while a vaccine normally confers permanent immunity.
KMag 5y ago
Does the book account for the effect of more people undergoing testing once there was an effective treatment? If there's no effective treatment, testing mostly benefits others.

01100011 5y ago

We'll cure those too. Rather than worrying about that scenario, I'd rather consider what the world will be like when there are no STDs. It's certainly more amusing than fretting about something that has already happened(super-variants of run of the mill STDs). As an aside, I wonder what role STDs played in the development of religion and the religious superstitions surrounding sex. Can monogamy survive in the long-term in a world without consequences to promiscuity?

Valgrim 5y ago
What do you mean by can monogamy survive? Do you mean that in a world without STDs it would be abnormal for someone to expect an intimate relationship to be exclusive?
- Frost1x 5y ago
  The intimate relationship is one component of monogamy, there's also having a steady nearly guaranteed sexual partner with low risks. Ideally you're both monogamous so unless one had STIs before entering the relationship, it's incredibly unlikely either would acquire one and almost certainly not from intercourse but through some other means. There are people more interested in the low risk stable sexual benefits of a trustworthy monogamous relationship. I personally doubt it's more than the number of people wanting an intimate relationship beyond sex though.
  - deleted 5y ago
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  - justinator 5y ago
    The intimate relationship is one component of monogamy It's certainly not exclusive to monogamy.
  - Cthulhu_ 5y ago
    To add, relationships are not only about sex or a sexual partner. The emphasis in a proper relationship is on the partner part, not the sex part.

jliptzin 5y ago

People are going to have unsafe sex for the entirety of human existence, period. Even during the height of the HIV epidemic in the 80s they were still doing it. We should accept that truth and work now to be prepared for the next pandemic. If you insist on people using condoms just in case a novel virus is circulating, then we should all be wearing masks too at all times well into the future. Respiratory viruses can be just as bad as sexually transmitted ones.

tsimionescu 5y ago

HIV didn't come about because of unsafe sex, it was a freak accident involving blood. And as far as I can tell, in the history of modern humans there have been three STDs that have been life-threatening: Siphilis, HPV and HIV. So I wouldn't worry too much. Remeber that unsafe sex is the natural norm, especially if you don't have to worry about unwanted pregnancy (as in the case of gay people). Safe sex only truly became a necessity because of HIV, an extremely recent phenomenon.

Draken93 5y ago

"Too many young people, specifically gay males" Do you have any data to support this allegation?

vineyardmike 5y ago
Not OP, and generally don't agree with their point, but this passes the general sanity test. Considering PREP is targeted almost exclusively to gay men, and HIV is mostly a concern among the sexually active gay male population, saying "young, gay, men" is pretty fitting. Obviously the value-judgement about how much sex is too much or too risky can't have data to back this up. To me, as long as there is a net reduction in risky behavior that might impact society (not spreading a disease faster than eradicating it), its probably good, but this doesn't seem to be OP's view.
- Draken93 5y ago
  I should have cited the whole sentence. I do not want to discuss a higher incidence of HIV in the group of gay males compared to the whole population. That is a fact that is attributable to the fact that unprotected anal sex comes with a higher infection risk then unprotected vaginal sex. But the OP claimes that "specifically [young] gay males think as long as they are safe from HIV, they are safe enough." That may be the result of unfortunate wording. But if not it is an allegation that the OP will have a very hard time to prove.

vineyardmike 5y ago

> makes me worry about the next 'HIV'. Too many young people, specifically gay males, think as long as they are safe from HIV, they are safe enough. So, first off, you might have a valid point but your approach sounds pretty biased. The wild generalizations about behavior, especially stigmatized behavior from a marginalized group, detracts from point about concern over a super-virus. Yes, gay men are often the topic of convo when it comes to HIV but it's not like they're the only ones passing around STDs. Also, I'm not sure its true that Prep has had a material increase in unsafe sex. Most gay men seem to think of it more as a means to not worry about dying from sex instead of an opportunity to dramatically change behavior. Thanks in-part to HIV gay men are probably also the population with the best insight into their sexual health - so if a concerning new STD did spread, they'd be the first to take the individual responsibility to stay regularly tested and informed. Birth-control and abortion and other related tools likely had a similar affect on heterosexual sex that prep had on gay men. There is a lot more heterosexual people to pass things around too. So calling out gay men might not be the most important piece to your worry about promiscuity leading to a super-virus. Prep-induced gay promiscuity inducing a new pandemic of super-STDs really sounds like a bad talking point for an extremist politician in a conservative country. Obviously, its possible, however improbable, but its probably not the best way to express this concern.

toper-centage 5y ago

While I agree with you, the truth is that among gay men, the use of condoms was already in sharp decline despite HIV, and before PrEP being so ubiquitous years ago. So while this medicine might have made people forgo condoms faster, it also came at the right time to prevent youths from a life with HIV. Furthermore, each new PrEP prescription (prepscription?) requires tests for a series of common STIs so at least guys are getting tested regularly now.