Comments on: Can you tell who has HIV?

By: Jessica

Jessica — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 13:14:47 +0000

Pos or Not is a large waste of money. I have recently started to work in the HIV prevention area in Kenya and my team and I, although initially in intrigued by the Pos or Not ‘game’, had an almost 100% correct strike rate when playing. So any underlying prejudices we had already were reinforced, not challenged. Plus the benefit of Hot or Not is being able to see the results of how other people have voted - Pos or Not would benefit from some sort of forum to discuss these results. There is nothing to keep a young person interested or to return. It is also not clear who the ‘game’ is aimed at - the subjects are all adults, yet the MTV audience is young people - children and teenagers. It feels like another awful waste of money and yet has been launched with real fanfare. It was first developed by students trying to win a competition judged by adults, it was not developed by and for young people.

By: elizabeth

elizabeth — Fri, 02 May 2008 23:21:06 +0000

V much on topic, I was in a gay bar In London the other day talking to a 20-something year old about this and that, and I said something along the lines of “it’s not as if you see people standing at the bar with Kaposi’s”. And he looked at me baffled, and said “What’s Kaposi’s?”

And people are still writing papers about a possible link between “treatment optimism” and risk behaviour?

By: Lee Rudolph

Lee Rudolph — Fri, 02 May 2008 21:21:52 +0000

“More politely, while I’m on syphils, check this delightful essay by Marlene Zuk. It discusses whether or not it is in syphilis’s own interest to leave ugly, suppurating boils on the genitals. But it’s delightful, really.”

No doubt it would be hellishly difficult to untangle relevant information from the huge mass of data on HIV, but I wondered, when I read that essay the other day, whether (at least, in the earlier stages of the epidemic, when its evolution wasn’t being modified at all by drugs, because there were none) similar pressures might have favored strains of the virus that postponed (or never manifested) laying the groundwork for Kaposi’s sarcoma. Certainly, early accounts in (lay) literature, e.g., _And The Band Played On_, played up the cosmetic horrors of KS — I remember one particularly overwrought passage (maybe not from that book) describing “Patient Zero”, dimly lighted so that his sarcoma couldn’t be seen, having sex and then pointing to the Deadly Disfiguration and cackling “now you’re infected too”, one clear implication being that if his partner had seen the sarcoma he’d have steered clear. These days, on the other hand, KS seems (to me, purely anecdotally) not to be brought up much.