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potatthrowaway t1_jbrvtkg wrote

Reply to comment by Dudicus445 in Greg Louganis auctioning Olympic medals to help AIDS services center by bagelman4000

My point is we did it before with far worse technology than we have now, far worse a grasp on epidemics than we have now. The tools we used to eradicate those diseases still exist, the methodologies still exist and have been monumentally improved upon. We work with technologies people of only a decade ago would deem impossible. These problems are indeed complicated, but we've banded together to solve complicated problems before.

If we were to throw ourselves entirely at eradicating AIDS, it'd be done in many parts of the world in a matter of years, I'd say. Not decades, hears. Just like we did with smallpox, just like we did with polio, and just like we did with cholera.

It's like we're in a daze and can't just pick something to focus on.

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jemidiah t1_jbs32ux wrote

Basically eradicating polio took near-universal childhood injections. That's really doable outside of extraordinarily remote places like mountain villages in Afghanistan, which coincidentally is where polio remains endemic.

Basically eradicating HIV with the tools we have available instead requires most every infected person to (1) know they're infected, and (2) stay on treatment for the rest of their life. These are especially difficult requirements in places with poor medical infrastructure, like sub-Saharan Africa.

Comparing the two is really comparing apples and oranges at a technical level. HIV is just vastly harder to knock out, despite immense advances in technology.

That said, MSM communities in advanced countries have experienced consistently lower transmission over the last few years, probably due to the prevalence of PreP. There's a chance that HIV in those communities will be very rare in the coming decades. Hopefully the rest of the world will follow.

Or who knows? Maybe an HIV vaccine will finally prove effective some year? It's not as if they've stopped trying, they just always get halted early because they don't work. It's very disheartening.

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Dudicus445 t1_jbs9nt9 wrote

I do believe that we are only a few years, or not a decade, away from an HIV vaccine

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-little-dorrit- t1_jbtk4ej wrote

Your comment is making an erroneous assumption that all viruses are treated equally, when this couldn’t be further from the truth.

People are working hard on the finding a vaccine or other treatments for the HIV virus (and don’t forget we already have antiretrovirals and PrEP), and we are getting closer every day to a vaccine. There are many other diseases that are epidemic-scale that also do not yet have a cure (Alzheimer’s for example). HIV is an incredibly complex virus. Only ten years ago a friend of mine who is a biologist working in virology told me that a cure is impossible because of how it works, how it invades immune cells, how it mutates and how it can evade detection and lie dormant in ‘sleeper’ immune cells. However attitudes and forecasts have changed because biotech has come so far. Now the general feeling is that we will crack it, sooner or later.

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Stanley--Nickels t1_jbsjkyz wrote

Unfortunately we have yet to eradicate polio and have even had some setbacks in recent years, but we’re close.

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