The response to Covid has also been night-and-day compared to AIDS - e.g. Trump was - I would argue - criminally negligent and disrespectful to the victims, but the Reagan admin were cracking jokes about it for example.
It's crazy to think about how HIV has killed some ~32 million people, and yet we rarely hear about it anymore. COVID probably won't even hit 4 million deaths (barring some much deadlier variant that we can't easily produce a new vaccine for).
Right, I don't mean to downplay the severity of COVID at all. It's just interesting that we generally don't hear a lot about HIV/AIDS anymore, even though there were still 690,000 deaths associated with it in 2019.
I also realize that probably depends largely on where you live.
The treatments for HIV are incredibly effective, if you can afford them. It can even reduce your viral load to undetectable. There is a campaign that Undetectable=Untransmittable, to reduce the stigma associated with it. I have to admit I don't know if I'm comfortable with having unprotected sex with someone who had the virus, but the data says it's safe.
There is also pre exposure prophylaxis, which isn't a vaccine but does dramatically reduce the risk.
Between the two, the disease just isn't the problem it used to be -- assuming you can afford it. In poor counties it's still a problem.
HIV is not a proximity transmissible disease so the reality is it's well controlled anywhere you've managed to get the use of barrier contraception methods into widespread adoption.
And at the end of the day if it can't spread through casual contact then it's impact on wider society will be limited once it's understood.
> I also realize that probably depends largely on where you live.
Yeah, I think this can largely be explained by the usual tendency to focus on our own backyards. Google says 'nearly 13,000 people with AIDS in the United States die each year', and I assume the rate is similar in other wealthy countries. Even if we assume the full total is causally attributable to AIDS, that's significantly less than the usual toll from flu, which we also tend to treat rather casually (which isn't to say that we should).
HIV is only transmitted during the exchange of bodily fluids.
Beyond that, we learned to treat it extremely effectively, today if someone who is HIV-positive adheres to their antiretroviral therapy they have a normal life expectancy.
With PReP and PEP HIV is preventable, containable, manageable and no longer leads to AIDS and death. It’s just a chronic infection with no health effects. Is it really still considered an ongoing pandemic?
Yes, because it continues to spread widely and access to treatment, let alone PReP, is extremely uneven across the world.
Both PReP and antivirals are also not easy. You don't just get a shot and not worry about HIV for a few years, you have to take a pill every day as long as you're sexually active, and then treatment antivirals are expensive and need to be used consistently as well. One person slipping up can mean a lot of people catch it. Even assuming you know you have it to begin with, which is often not obvious until you've been a carrier for a while.
Never mind religious groups going around vilifying condoms doesn't help.
It's getting better, but yes it is still considered a global pandemic.
I mean, it's not the same thing as COVID but like COVID it carries with it its own unique challenges and at no point has the world dumped billions of dollars into single-use vaccines for it like we've done with COVID. Its stigma has migrated (or compounded) from a "gay disease" to an "african disease".
Honestly, I really hope that one silver lining out of all this is that an mRNA vaccine for HIV might get some development now. There was some work that way before everything got diverted to COVID and now that tech has proven itself so...
If taking a pill to protect your own life every day is too much hard work we are doomed. But we aren’t, as PReP both protects people from infecting others as well as getting infected themselves.
So no, an infection does not require one person to slip up. For an infection to occur requires both persons to slip up.
Getting PReP requires regular HIV tests so it is in fact obvious that you are infected, if you get infected.
Of course this indeed only solves the issue in the developed world that can pay for (and wants to use) this medication but there really is no way around that. People that don’t want or can’t pay for this medication won’t want and be able to pay for a vaccine either.
