4 ms·

The cure for HIV/AIDS has been one clinical trial away for >>30 years, now. Don't believe the hype. Wait for results.

acdha 5y ago
How many people are effectively managing the disease now who would have died 30 years ago? Perhaps you should be less glib out of respect for their lives.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  You're responding to somebody mentioning that a cure has been announced as being immanent a dozen times, not somebody who is denouncing medicine in general. No need to attack unless you actually disagree.
  - acdha 5y ago
    It's not an attack to remember that medicine is about saving lives: changing HIV from a death sentence to a daily pill was _huge_ improvement for people and it feels quite weird to act as if nothing changed.
- dekhn 5y ago
  cure and treatment are two totally different things
  - acdha 5y ago
    They're different but not completely so: what I'd look at is the cost to someone's life. For example, glasses don't “cure” bad eyesight but they lower the impact down to the point where most people don't care. Type 1 diabetes used to be a death sentence, it's still uncurable and while it's not fun to have I know plenty of people would have died before graduating high school a century ago who are living normal lives, raising children, etc. Similarly, when I was growing up HIV was a death sentence and it was tearing through many social groups. The gay friends I have, especially the slightly older ones, have talked about the trauma that caused because their social networks were decimated _and_ a lot of people blamed the suffering on them. Now, it's not ideal to be on medication but it means that people are reaching close to average longevity with far more manageable health impacts — again, not perfect but decades of extra time with friends and family is a transformative change.
- the-dude 5y ago
  This is totally uncalled for IMHO.
  - acdha 5y ago
    What about dismissing decades of hard work by many thousands of people as “hype”? There've been a lot of disappointments along the way but it's not like these were the people pushing Ivermectin as a COVID treatment — a ton of scientific careers have been spent working on this and it seems far too glib to brush that away as if there isn't a life-changingly better prognosis for someone who learned they were infected today compared to 30 years ago.
    - the-dude 5y ago
      Don't believe the hype is a common expression in English. You are just reading much too much into it IMHO. And I don't like to see discussions derail into this.
      - acdha 5y ago
        If you're familiar with the expression, you're also familiar with it having a connotation of something being oversold, usually for reasons of sales or politics. I don't think that's a fair way to describe good faith scientific research into a hard problem.
        claytongulick 5y ago
        You've had three, (now four) people explicitly mention that your comment was needlessly hostile. To each of those people, you've responded defensively. I would suggest that you carefully review what was written, what you wrote, what the feedback from it was, and consider if there is room for improvement rather than just digging in.
        acdha 5y ago
        Since your reply was cordial, I'll note that I probably would have used wording to make it more clear that I was specifically unimpressed by the use of terms like hype or what read as the implication that there's been a widespread representation that a cure is close. I've typically only seen that in the context of the various scam claims over the years, not mainstream research — the coverage I've read since at least the 90s always mentioned it as a very hard target a long time off. Maybe I'm a bit biased from having worked at some places where researchers were working on problems like this but it felt unfair to focus on that but not mention that there are now mainstream treatments developed as part of that work which have made a huge improvement for millions of people globally.
- tharne 5y ago
  > How many people are effectively managing the disease now who would have died 30 years ago? Perhaps you should be less glib out of respect for their lives. I don't think the parent commenter was being glib. Treatments are great, but a treatment is not the same thing as a cure. Lots folks successfully treat their diabetes, but I'll bet most of them would prefer a cure for diabetes.
  - acdha 5y ago
    No question, but that doesn’t make science hype just because it didn’t produce a cure by the end of the episode. Just in case it wasn’t clear, I’m explicitly calling out that choice of wording. If they’d said “this is a notoriously hard problem”, I’d agree.
tinus_hn 5y ago
While PEP/PrEP is not a cure for HIV infection it both prevents AIDS and suppresses HIV so far that patients are no longer infectious. This solution is real, proven and available and is applied in practice right now. The only practical difference between this and a vaccine is that the user has to keep taking medication.

How many people are effectively managing the disease now who would have died 30 years ago? Perhaps you should be less glib out of respect for their lives.

pessimizer 5y ago
You're responding to somebody mentioning that a cure has been announced as being immanent a dozen times, not somebody who is denouncing medicine in general. No need to attack unless you actually disagree.
- acdha 5y ago
  It's not an attack to remember that medicine is about saving lives: changing HIV from a death sentence to a daily pill was _huge_ improvement for people and it feels quite weird to act as if nothing changed.
dekhn 5y ago
cure and treatment are two totally different things
- acdha 5y ago
  They're different but not completely so: what I'd look at is the cost to someone's life. For example, glasses don't “cure” bad eyesight but they lower the impact down to the point where most people don't care. Type 1 diabetes used to be a death sentence, it's still uncurable and while it's not fun to have I know plenty of people would have died before graduating high school a century ago who are living normal lives, raising children, etc. Similarly, when I was growing up HIV was a death sentence and it was tearing through many social groups. The gay friends I have, especially the slightly older ones, have talked about the trauma that caused because their social networks were decimated _and_ a lot of people blamed the suffering on them. Now, it's not ideal to be on medication but it means that people are reaching close to average longevity with far more manageable health impacts — again, not perfect but decades of extra time with friends and family is a transformative change.
the-dude 5y ago
This is totally uncalled for IMHO.
- acdha 5y ago
  What about dismissing decades of hard work by many thousands of people as “hype”? There've been a lot of disappointments along the way but it's not like these were the people pushing Ivermectin as a COVID treatment — a ton of scientific careers have been spent working on this and it seems far too glib to brush that away as if there isn't a life-changingly better prognosis for someone who learned they were infected today compared to 30 years ago.
  - the-dude 5y ago
    Don't believe the hype is a common expression in English. You are just reading much too much into it IMHO. And I don't like to see discussions derail into this.
    - acdha 5y ago
      If you're familiar with the expression, you're also familiar with it having a connotation of something being oversold, usually for reasons of sales or politics. I don't think that's a fair way to describe good faith scientific research into a hard problem.
      - claytongulick 5y ago
        You've had three, (now four) people explicitly mention that your comment was needlessly hostile. To each of those people, you've responded defensively. I would suggest that you carefully review what was written, what you wrote, what the feedback from it was, and consider if there is room for improvement rather than just digging in.
        acdha 5y ago
        Since your reply was cordial, I'll note that I probably would have used wording to make it more clear that I was specifically unimpressed by the use of terms like hype or what read as the implication that there's been a widespread representation that a cure is close. I've typically only seen that in the context of the various scam claims over the years, not mainstream research — the coverage I've read since at least the 90s always mentioned it as a very hard target a long time off. Maybe I'm a bit biased from having worked at some places where researchers were working on problems like this but it felt unfair to focus on that but not mention that there are now mainstream treatments developed as part of that work which have made a huge improvement for millions of people globally.
tharne 5y ago
> How many people are effectively managing the disease now who would have died 30 years ago? Perhaps you should be less glib out of respect for their lives. I don't think the parent commenter was being glib. Treatments are great, but a treatment is not the same thing as a cure. Lots folks successfully treat their diabetes, but I'll bet most of them would prefer a cure for diabetes.
- acdha 5y ago
  No question, but that doesn’t make science hype just because it didn’t produce a cure by the end of the episode. Just in case it wasn’t clear, I’m explicitly calling out that choice of wording. If they’d said “this is a notoriously hard problem”, I’d agree.

tinus_hn 5y ago

While PEP/PrEP is not a cure for HIV infection it both prevents AIDS and suppresses HIV so far that patients are no longer infectious. This solution is real, proven and available and is applied in practice right now. The only practical difference between this and a vaccine is that the user has to keep taking medication.