8 ms·

Three women contract HIV from dirty "vampire facials" at unlicensed spa

74 points by alphabettsy 2y ago

ultimoo 2y ago
> "Vampire facial" is the common name for a platelet-rich plasma microneedling procedure. In this treatment, a patient's blood is drawn, spun down to separate out plasma from blood cells, and the platelet-rich plasma is then injected into the face with microneedles. It's claimed—with little evidence—that it can rejuvenate and improve the look of skin, and got notable promotions from celebrities, including Gwyneth Paltrow and Kim Kardashian.
- helsinkiandrew 2y ago
  > In an inspection in the fall of 2018, health investigators found shocking conditions: unwrapped syringes in drawers and counters, unlabeled tubes of blood sitting out on a kitchen counter, more unlabeled blood and medical injectables alongside food in a kitchen fridge, and disposable equipment—electric desiccator tips—that were reused. The facility also did not have an autoclave—a pressurized oven—for sterilizing equipment.
  - ryoshu 2y ago
    Tattoo studios have better hygiene.
    - Freedom2 2y ago
      ... of course they do? Why wouldn't they?
- voidfunc 2y ago
  The absolutely insane shit people will do in the quest for beauty...
hollywood_court 2y ago
[flagged]
- bloopernova 2y ago
  I wish I could print out this headline on business cards and just hand one to whomever states "what has government/regulation ever done for us!?!?" EDIT: changed "perhaps" to "I wish".
- saas_sam 2y ago
  Are you saying that government regulation prevented this thing that happened from happening? Because that doesn't seem to have occurred here.
  - sva_ 2y ago
    It prevented it from continuing.
  - timemct 2y ago
    It sounds like it might've helped prevent even more infections. Stopping a bad practices doesn't change the past, but it can help influence the future.
  - yareal 2y ago
    It almost certainly limited the blast radius. Tattooing is a similar procedure, and is cleaner and safer than ever. No regulation prevents 100%, but they do help.
- cat_plus_plus 2y ago
  You can't regulate stupidity and also I am against my stupidity being regulated. I might want to jump out of a perfectly good moving plane midflight to experience the thrill of what people then have to do to possibly survive, let me. Otherwise I will do it anyway without benefit of being able to research different legal providers of this thrill. One could argue for "explain what risks are and which precautions we are and aren't taking" government regulation and in fact I had to sign a slip of paper saying that jumping out of plane might be dangerous. But do you really expect idiots to listen? Two horny people might also have sex and pass HIV to each other. Unlike conservatives (marriage license) or liberals (MeToo consent form), libertarians like myself do not want to force them to sign a piece of paper first, though I think they should exercise due diligence. As a practical matter, I don't actually care if you have to sign a piece of paper before getting a vampire facial, it will not ruin the mood to the same degree. But how much difference would it actually make given all the numerous ways one can hurt themselves doing stupid things? If you try to regulate all of them, that would really be a totalitarian nightmare where government is constantly watching you and stopping you from living your life as you want.
gorjusborg 2y ago
Who knew that there might be risks from injecting pieces of other people's bodies into your own?
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  It's (supposed to be) their own, not someone else's. The place was reusing needles and whatnot.
- bastawhiz 2y ago
  Well, it's supposed to be injecting bits of your own body. But when the place doesn't even own an autoclave and reuses disposable equipment, I suppose you get what you pay for.
  - gorjusborg 2y ago
    Oh, that makes much more sense, I misunderstood the description of the procedure. Edit: But it still sounds like an insane thing to do.
  - hellofellows 2y ago
    > you get what you pay for that's not always the case -- there are plenty of places where the prices are rocket-level but services dismal you can hide a lot using marketing...
    - barbazoo 2y ago
      Then there is the whole thing about the procedure having no effect anyway which is easy to find out.
- cultofmetatron 2y ago
  > injecting pieces of other people's bodies I've had this done. They draw your own blood and run it through a centrifuge to extract the plasma. there is NO reason the people getting this should have had to worry if not for the complete and other negligence and callousness of th clinic.
sva_ 2y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
mkl95 2y ago
The silver lining is that they are lucky to have contracted HIV rather than some of the nastier stuff. There are plenty of worse reality checks.
- Hamuko 2y ago
  How manageable is HIV these days?
  - est31 2y ago
    If you have access to HIV drugs, it's pretty manageable. You will always be immunocompromised however, your mucosal T-cells will never be the same, but in the great picture, life expectancy with medicated HIV is as good as life expectancy without HIV. Having to take daily pills until you die is still a pretty nasty thing however :), there is no cure. I would definitely group HIV with the "nastier stuff".
  - TrackerFF 2y ago
    Very manageable. Even in larger cities it is quite rare to see patients with full-blown AIDS - and the few times that happens, it comes down to: - Severe drug addiction and (often combined with) mental illness that results in the patient not being able to follow the drug regiment. This is the main reason. - Religious reasons, homeopathy, etc. The patient believes they can prey the illness away, use alternative medicine, or similar. - Extreme denial. The patient simply doesn't believe they have HIV, and thus refuse to take medication. Most places in the western world HIV medication is free, for obvious reasons.
  - serf 2y ago
    I hate the term manageable because it implies a lot of stuff that people take for granted. I have a manageable disease (not HIV), and one of my biggest (albeit fantasy) gripes is that for better or worse I cannot choose to opt out of society. I can't live on a desert island. I'll die if i'm ever a castaway regardless of how well packed the island is with coconut trees. More realistically it means that I can't be away from 'shipping range' for any more than a week or two before supplies dwindle and I meander back to society, having hit the extents of my leash. This sucks as a sailor. It's actually not manageable with the hobby of sailing long distances, forcing all sorts of compromises that turn the hobby into something different. So, when someone describes something as manageable, well, it's generic and leaves out so much context as to be worthwhile for only a small feel-good sound-bite. Maybe that person finds it manageable; it's not advice to be applied globally.
lsaferite 2y ago
Just a meta-observation on the discourse here. I'm _shocked_ that the discourse on ArsTechnica for this story seems civilized while here on HN it's all (so far) snark.
- slingnow 2y ago
  Really? HN has been a mini-Reddit for quite some time now. Frequently just a bunch of low quality, unfunny and recycled one-liners hoping to grab a few precious internet points.
  - financltravsty 2y ago
    Phone posters, Eternal September, tech industry interlopers.
    - emestifs 2y ago
      Unrelated to you comment here, but I figured you'll see this reply rather than one from your week old comment. I replied to your serverless comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40054222 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40054222 Very interested in what more you have to say, if you're interesting in discussing it more.
      - financltravsty 2y ago
        Apologies, I'm on a phone -- and quite tired -- but I will try. The general ethos of my gripes with serverless are here (not my post): https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/14noh28/comment/jq95xzb/ https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/14noh28/comment/jq95xz... It excels in only one area: scaling. You can "scale down to zero" (to the point where if there is no usage, you theoretically are not paying for stand-by hardware). You also do not have to -- theoretically -- worry about scaling rules and about provisioning more hardware when your service needs more workers to handle demand. However, everywhere else it is a shit-show. Not being able to do anything resembling local testing & debugging requires you either: keep the architecture very simple (why use serverless in that case?), try and spin up one of the numerous half-baked virtualization solutions, or spend more time writing, testing, and maintaining scaffolding/mocking/whatever to interface between all your "add-ons" (e.g. SQS, S3, etc.). Your only way to track message flow is with extensive and expressive logging. Deployment is a pain. What should be a sub 30second operation is routinely 5mins for even the smallest packages (AWS deployment tools are stupid inefficient) -- annoyingly breaking any sort of flow every time you have to deploy to test things you cannot test locally. Now imagine that being your working loop every day -- utter madness if you want to keep any sort of velocity or morale. The ecosystem is not mature. I still have packaging utilities (built and maintained by a mag7) that fail silently causing production outages. The other tooling is also half-baked and a pain in the ass to use (much less learn the edge cases around). Serverless (the framework) is a shitty replacement for Terraform. The lack of a language server to understand whether or not my YAML IaC will actually do what I want it to do without dry-running is tedious. Containers are wasteful, half-baked, and unperformant. My workloads have always been either CPU or I/O heavy. No I do not need 2GB of RAM and a single (unknown spec) vCPU. I need at most a 100MB of RAM for my JVM/CLR and a fast-enough CPU. But the only way to provision a faster/less gimped CPU is to "bump the tier" of the lambda by provisioning more memory. Ergo you pay for memory you do not use nor need, simply so your lambda doesn't time out in its maximum 15min container lifespan, on heavy workloads. The file handle limits are also something asinine, like 128 open handles per lambda with no way to modify. So I cannot open more than ~128 network sockets when I need to fan out compute to get past kneecapped container resources. Cold-starts: it's been beaten to death. But if you're running a language with a bytecode interpreter your options are to either provision concurrency (i.e. force a container to always be warm/spun-up, and incurring all those costs, which would have been unarguably cheaper with a server, even an EC2) or modify your source and ahead-of-time compile everything you can. Otherwise, you will not get sub 300ms cold invocations (a sever in the most optimal location would get you sub 10ms latencies). If you have long-running workloads or are trying to squeeze the most performance out of your backend: serverless is not going to cut it. This is ignoring all the inter-infrastructure communication that add even more latency. N.B. this is for moderately complex web apps built on AWS, it may not be wholly representative of the landscape. And apologies for the harsh language, but the entire "serverless" hype has given me plenty of scar tissue -- especially in a "move fast, now!" startup landscape.
dfxm12 2y ago
This would make for a good episode of the old Vanity Insanity docuseries.
Slava_Propanei 2y ago
[dead]
DoreenMichele 2y ago
Notice how it's never men doing stupidly risky stuff to try to look young and beautiful. The societal pressure on women to look young and beautiful is ridiculous. And influential women actively promoting such garbage is part of the problem. Men get former Mr. Universe's modeling "eat right and exercise." (Arnold in case you aren't getting the reference.) Women get this kind of crap.
- itishappy 2y ago
  Oh, we do our share of dumb shit too. Ever heard of synthol or jelqing?
  - DoreenMichele 2y ago
    No, never heard of them. And didn't claim you don't. But it's not this shit in the name of youth and beauty.
    - moooo99 2y ago
      > But it's not this shit in the name of youth and beauty. Yeah its shit in the name of a bigger biceps and a bigger junk, I don't see how that is any better?
      - DoreenMichele 2y ago
        Women get surgery to get bigger boobs, primarily as a looks thing. Are we at the stage of inserting silicone in your junk so your jock strap looks better? (Please note you can just pad your bra if you want to look busty fully clothed. And it leaves scars, so I'm skeptical of the value it has for looking good naked or in teeny, tiny bikinis.)
        itishappy 2y ago
        > Are we at the stage of inserting silicone in your junk so your jock strap looks better? Yes. Packers exist. Also Synthol is oil injected into your muscles to make them look better.
TrackerFF 2y ago
[flagged]
aaron695 2y ago
[dead]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
inasio 2y ago
There are a bunch of weird things in the article. HIV typically has three phases: acute for first 6 months (most contagious, perhaps cold symptoms), chronic for up 11 years if untreated, or much longer if under treatment, and then AIDS. Per the report two cases were acute and one case (two?) had AIDS, yet they all fell within the same viral DNA cluster (AIDS if infected in 2018 would be rare). So it seems that they were infected at very different times, yet they share a common viral strand. One explanation was that the clinic was using infected blood rather than customers' own blood, but even that sounds weird.
- hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
  > AIDS if infected in 2018 would be rare. That's incorrect. 8-10 years is generally reported as the "average" time from infection to AIDS, but faster progressions are by no means rare. One study found that up to 13% of newly infected patients may develop AIDS within one year. Developing AIDS 6 years out from infection is certainly unfortunate but by no means rare.
rysertio 2y ago
I think everyone should be thought how to sterilize equipment properly. It should be in every third graders textbook.

74 points by alphabettsy 2y ago

> "Vampire facial" is the common name for a platelet-rich plasma microneedling procedure. In this treatment, a patient's blood is drawn, spun down to separate out plasma from blood cells, and the platelet-rich plasma is then injected into the face with microneedles. It's claimed—with little evidence—that it can rejuvenate and improve the look of skin, and got notable promotions from celebrities, including Gwyneth Paltrow and Kim Kardashian.

helsinkiandrew 2y ago
> In an inspection in the fall of 2018, health investigators found shocking conditions: unwrapped syringes in drawers and counters, unlabeled tubes of blood sitting out on a kitchen counter, more unlabeled blood and medical injectables alongside food in a kitchen fridge, and disposable equipment—electric desiccator tips—that were reused. The facility also did not have an autoclave—a pressurized oven—for sterilizing equipment.
- ryoshu 2y ago
  Tattoo studios have better hygiene.
  - Freedom2 2y ago
    ... of course they do? Why wouldn't they?
voidfunc 2y ago
The absolutely insane shit people will do in the quest for beauty...

hollywood_court 2y ago

[flagged]

bloopernova 2y ago
I wish I could print out this headline on business cards and just hand one to whomever states "what has government/regulation ever done for us!?!?" EDIT: changed "perhaps" to "I wish".
saas_sam 2y ago
Are you saying that government regulation prevented this thing that happened from happening? Because that doesn't seem to have occurred here.
- sva_ 2y ago
  It prevented it from continuing.
- timemct 2y ago
  It sounds like it might've helped prevent even more infections. Stopping a bad practices doesn't change the past, but it can help influence the future.
- yareal 2y ago
  It almost certainly limited the blast radius. Tattooing is a similar procedure, and is cleaner and safer than ever. No regulation prevents 100%, but they do help.
cat_plus_plus 2y ago
You can't regulate stupidity and also I am against my stupidity being regulated. I might want to jump out of a perfectly good moving plane midflight to experience the thrill of what people then have to do to possibly survive, let me. Otherwise I will do it anyway without benefit of being able to research different legal providers of this thrill. One could argue for "explain what risks are and which precautions we are and aren't taking" government regulation and in fact I had to sign a slip of paper saying that jumping out of plane might be dangerous. But do you really expect idiots to listen? Two horny people might also have sex and pass HIV to each other. Unlike conservatives (marriage license) or liberals (MeToo consent form), libertarians like myself do not want to force them to sign a piece of paper first, though I think they should exercise due diligence. As a practical matter, I don't actually care if you have to sign a piece of paper before getting a vampire facial, it will not ruin the mood to the same degree. But how much difference would it actually make given all the numerous ways one can hurt themselves doing stupid things? If you try to regulate all of them, that would really be a totalitarian nightmare where government is constantly watching you and stopping you from living your life as you want.

gorjusborg 2y ago

Who knew that there might be risks from injecting pieces of other people's bodies into your own?

ceejayoz 2y ago
It's (supposed to be) their own, not someone else's. The place was reusing needles and whatnot.
bastawhiz 2y ago
Well, it's supposed to be injecting bits of your own body. But when the place doesn't even own an autoclave and reuses disposable equipment, I suppose you get what you pay for.
- gorjusborg 2y ago
  Oh, that makes much more sense, I misunderstood the description of the procedure. Edit: But it still sounds like an insane thing to do.
- hellofellows 2y ago
  > you get what you pay for that's not always the case -- there are plenty of places where the prices are rocket-level but services dismal you can hide a lot using marketing...
  - barbazoo 2y ago
    Then there is the whole thing about the procedure having no effect anyway which is easy to find out.
cultofmetatron 2y ago
> injecting pieces of other people's bodies I've had this done. They draw your own blood and run it through a centrifuge to extract the plasma. there is NO reason the people getting this should have had to worry if not for the complete and other negligence and callousness of th clinic.

sva_ 2y ago

[flagged]

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

mkl95 2y ago

The silver lining is that they are lucky to have contracted HIV rather than some of the nastier stuff. There are plenty of worse reality checks.

Hamuko 2y ago
How manageable is HIV these days?
- est31 2y ago
  If you have access to HIV drugs, it's pretty manageable. You will always be immunocompromised however, your mucosal T-cells will never be the same, but in the great picture, life expectancy with medicated HIV is as good as life expectancy without HIV. Having to take daily pills until you die is still a pretty nasty thing however :), there is no cure. I would definitely group HIV with the "nastier stuff".
- TrackerFF 2y ago
  Very manageable. Even in larger cities it is quite rare to see patients with full-blown AIDS - and the few times that happens, it comes down to: - Severe drug addiction and (often combined with) mental illness that results in the patient not being able to follow the drug regiment. This is the main reason. - Religious reasons, homeopathy, etc. The patient believes they can prey the illness away, use alternative medicine, or similar. - Extreme denial. The patient simply doesn't believe they have HIV, and thus refuse to take medication. Most places in the western world HIV medication is free, for obvious reasons.
- serf 2y ago
  I hate the term manageable because it implies a lot of stuff that people take for granted. I have a manageable disease (not HIV), and one of my biggest (albeit fantasy) gripes is that for better or worse I cannot choose to opt out of society. I can't live on a desert island. I'll die if i'm ever a castaway regardless of how well packed the island is with coconut trees. More realistically it means that I can't be away from 'shipping range' for any more than a week or two before supplies dwindle and I meander back to society, having hit the extents of my leash. This sucks as a sailor. It's actually not manageable with the hobby of sailing long distances, forcing all sorts of compromises that turn the hobby into something different. So, when someone describes something as manageable, well, it's generic and leaves out so much context as to be worthwhile for only a small feel-good sound-bite. Maybe that person finds it manageable; it's not advice to be applied globally.

lsaferite 2y ago

Just a meta-observation on the discourse here. I'm _shocked_ that the discourse on ArsTechnica for this story seems civilized while here on HN it's all (so far) snark.

slingnow 2y ago
Really? HN has been a mini-Reddit for quite some time now. Frequently just a bunch of low quality, unfunny and recycled one-liners hoping to grab a few precious internet points.
- financltravsty 2y ago
  Phone posters, Eternal September, tech industry interlopers.
  - emestifs 2y ago
    Unrelated to you comment here, but I figured you'll see this reply rather than one from your week old comment. I replied to your serverless comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40054222 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40054222 Very interested in what more you have to say, if you're interesting in discussing it more.
    - financltravsty 2y ago
      Apologies, I'm on a phone -- and quite tired -- but I will try. The general ethos of my gripes with serverless are here (not my post): https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/14noh28/comment/jq95xzb/ https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/14noh28/comment/jq95xz... It excels in only one area: scaling. You can "scale down to zero" (to the point where if there is no usage, you theoretically are not paying for stand-by hardware). You also do not have to -- theoretically -- worry about scaling rules and about provisioning more hardware when your service needs more workers to handle demand. However, everywhere else it is a shit-show. Not being able to do anything resembling local testing & debugging requires you either: keep the architecture very simple (why use serverless in that case?), try and spin up one of the numerous half-baked virtualization solutions, or spend more time writing, testing, and maintaining scaffolding/mocking/whatever to interface between all your "add-ons" (e.g. SQS, S3, etc.). Your only way to track message flow is with extensive and expressive logging. Deployment is a pain. What should be a sub 30second operation is routinely 5mins for even the smallest packages (AWS deployment tools are stupid inefficient) -- annoyingly breaking any sort of flow every time you have to deploy to test things you cannot test locally. Now imagine that being your working loop every day -- utter madness if you want to keep any sort of velocity or morale. The ecosystem is not mature. I still have packaging utilities (built and maintained by a mag7) that fail silently causing production outages. The other tooling is also half-baked and a pain in the ass to use (much less learn the edge cases around). Serverless (the framework) is a shitty replacement for Terraform. The lack of a language server to understand whether or not my YAML IaC will actually do what I want it to do without dry-running is tedious. Containers are wasteful, half-baked, and unperformant. My workloads have always been either CPU or I/O heavy. No I do not need 2GB of RAM and a single (unknown spec) vCPU. I need at most a 100MB of RAM for my JVM/CLR and a fast-enough CPU. But the only way to provision a faster/less gimped CPU is to "bump the tier" of the lambda by provisioning more memory. Ergo you pay for memory you do not use nor need, simply so your lambda doesn't time out in its maximum 15min container lifespan, on heavy workloads. The file handle limits are also something asinine, like 128 open handles per lambda with no way to modify. So I cannot open more than ~128 network sockets when I need to fan out compute to get past kneecapped container resources. Cold-starts: it's been beaten to death. But if you're running a language with a bytecode interpreter your options are to either provision concurrency (i.e. force a container to always be warm/spun-up, and incurring all those costs, which would have been unarguably cheaper with a server, even an EC2) or modify your source and ahead-of-time compile everything you can. Otherwise, you will not get sub 300ms cold invocations (a sever in the most optimal location would get you sub 10ms latencies). If you have long-running workloads or are trying to squeeze the most performance out of your backend: serverless is not going to cut it. This is ignoring all the inter-infrastructure communication that add even more latency. N.B. this is for moderately complex web apps built on AWS, it may not be wholly representative of the landscape. And apologies for the harsh language, but the entire "serverless" hype has given me plenty of scar tissue -- especially in a "move fast, now!" startup landscape.

dfxm12 2y ago

This would make for a good episode of the old Vanity Insanity docuseries.

Slava_Propanei 2y ago

[dead]

DoreenMichele 2y ago

Notice how it's never men doing stupidly risky stuff to try to look young and beautiful. The societal pressure on women to look young and beautiful is ridiculous. And influential women actively promoting such garbage is part of the problem. Men get former Mr. Universe's modeling "eat right and exercise." (Arnold in case you aren't getting the reference.) Women get this kind of crap.

itishappy 2y ago
Oh, we do our share of dumb shit too. Ever heard of synthol or jelqing?
- DoreenMichele 2y ago
  No, never heard of them. And didn't claim you don't. But it's not this shit in the name of youth and beauty.
  - moooo99 2y ago
    > But it's not this shit in the name of youth and beauty. Yeah its shit in the name of a bigger biceps and a bigger junk, I don't see how that is any better?
    - DoreenMichele 2y ago
      Women get surgery to get bigger boobs, primarily as a looks thing. Are we at the stage of inserting silicone in your junk so your jock strap looks better? (Please note you can just pad your bra if you want to look busty fully clothed. And it leaves scars, so I'm skeptical of the value it has for looking good naked or in teeny, tiny bikinis.)
      - itishappy 2y ago
        > Are we at the stage of inserting silicone in your junk so your jock strap looks better? Yes. Packers exist. Also Synthol is oil injected into your muscles to make them look better.

TrackerFF 2y ago

[flagged]

aaron695 2y ago

[dead]

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

inasio 2y ago

There are a bunch of weird things in the article. HIV typically has three phases: acute for first 6 months (most contagious, perhaps cold symptoms), chronic for up 11 years if untreated, or much longer if under treatment, and then AIDS. Per the report two cases were acute and one case (two?) had AIDS, yet they all fell within the same viral DNA cluster (AIDS if infected in 2018 would be rare). So it seems that they were infected at very different times, yet they share a common viral strand. One explanation was that the clinic was using infected blood rather than customers' own blood, but even that sounds weird.

hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
> AIDS if infected in 2018 would be rare. That's incorrect. 8-10 years is generally reported as the "average" time from infection to AIDS, but faster progressions are by no means rare. One study found that up to 13% of newly infected patients may develop AIDS within one year. Developing AIDS 6 years out from infection is certainly unfortunate but by no means rare.

rysertio 2y ago

I think everyone should be thought how to sterilize equipment properly. It should be in every third graders textbook.