3 ms·

If he's not sick, then why should he take AZT? And if Typhoid Mary isn't sick, then why can't she work as a cook? The point is that even if you feel good now,

If he's not sick, then why should he take AZT? And if Typhoid Mary isn't sick, then why can't she work as a cook? The point is that even if you feel good now, a positive HIV test means that without treatment, you'll almost certainly die within the next 10-20 years. You can also infect others, and they'll die too. (As to the 14 years, the patient Mullis talked to was presumably some combination of lucky and/or benefiting from the AZT he'd taken previously.) Likewise, a positive SARS-CoV-2 test meant that you'll die with p ~ 1%[1] within the next couple months. That's much less bad than HIV, and the relative benefits of treatment are much smaller; but that's spectacularly higher than baseline mortality, so the test is clearly predictive. The concept of asymptomatic disease is well-recognized in medicine; just google the phrase. I'm not sure how Kary Mullis managed to convince so many people to reject it. 1. That's a CFR over all ages, confirmed deaths divided by confirmed positives. The IFR is of course lower, but the statement is conditioned on a positive test.

mike_hearn 3y ago
You're conflating asymptomatic with pre-symptomatic. The former means you never develop symptoms. The latter means you are about to get sick but aren't currently.
- tripletao 3y ago
  That HIV patient was indeed near-certain to be symptomatic later, but Typhoid Mary was permanently asymptomatic. That's unusual for typhoid, but for other pathogens (e.g. cytomegalovirus) most infected patients are permanently asymptomatic, with only a small minority of patients showing symptoms: https://www.cdc.gov/cmv/congenital-infection.html https://www.cdc.gov/cmv/congenital-infection.html Your claims are inconsistent with at least a century of boring, uncontroversial medicine. I don't know whether you're doing it knowingly, but you're closely repeating the arguments of Kary Mullis, who was clearly smart (he invented PCR!) but not exactly reliable (he denied that HIV causes AIDS! he saw a talking, fluorescent raccoon!).

mike_hearn 3y ago

You're conflating asymptomatic with pre-symptomatic. The former means you never develop symptoms. The latter means you are about to get sick but aren't currently.

tripletao 3y ago
That HIV patient was indeed near-certain to be symptomatic later, but Typhoid Mary was permanently asymptomatic. That's unusual for typhoid, but for other pathogens (e.g. cytomegalovirus) most infected patients are permanently asymptomatic, with only a small minority of patients showing symptoms: https://www.cdc.gov/cmv/congenital-infection.html https://www.cdc.gov/cmv/congenital-infection.html Your claims are inconsistent with at least a century of boring, uncontroversial medicine. I don't know whether you're doing it knowingly, but you're closely repeating the arguments of Kary Mullis, who was clearly smart (he invented PCR!) but not exactly reliable (he denied that HIV causes AIDS! he saw a talking, fluorescent raccoon!).