re: The biology that is HIV/AIDS is over my head

Everyone in Africa must be gay if you follow the OT's brilliant logic.

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From advertisement it appears it can detected and controlled now. Is the technology so advanced now? Or is there more awareness of the infected. Please those in the medical field chime in.

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The virus is small and has shitty replication machinery. DNA is made up of "base pairs," and when the protein designed to put the little pairs together, it is so bad that out of about 1000 base pairs total in the virus (very small) basically every possible mismatch (mutation) occurs within a 24-hour period. And nearly 50% of any combination of 2 mismatches occurs.

These mutations made it difficult to treat, because some mutations make some medications useless, and those strains come to be the predominate phenotype over time. This is solved by either genotyping the virus out (Magic Johnson was previously the only known person who could afford such a thing before it became a public health crisis), allowing for medication tailoring. Theoretically, in time, you should be able to observe what the predominate drugs that will work in sequence are.



So, cheaper drugs and testing mostly.

There was a doctor in the early 90’s that gave HIV to his mistress in Lafayette on purpose. Said it was a vitamin shot. I think she was going to blow the whistle on their relationship and he was mad and found blood drawn by an infected patient and injected it into her.

The mistress was fairly decent looking nurse. He was a total prick.

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But the blood banks refused to do their part. In his book, Shilts didn't go far enough in showing how much the blood banks wanted to protect their huge profits and not spend money on tests.

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Because of this thread I watched the HBO movie based on this book. The movie shows the blood industry fighting against testing for HIV. Their thought was that there are just not enough hemophiliacs out there to warrant spending the money.

The movie itself is kind of cheesy, with cringey one liners "If your house is on fire, you find the first water hose you can to put out the flames." "You have a better chance of winning the Indy 500 on rollerskates." But it was interesting nonetheless.