Korean Job Discussion Forums

[computermichael]

My Korean coworker brought up the topic of AIDS one day after I told him that I have a gay cousin. He asked if my cousin had AIDS because he was gay, so my other coworker and I explained to him how people can also get HIV from non-gay sex. He looked really concerned and asked if he could possibly have AIDS from having sex with his wife. Nobody bothered to mention that one gets HIV from other people who have it already, so I reckon he thought that it just happened from too much sex.

This guy is exceptionally dumb though. Koreans think so, too. He even lived in the US and Canada for almost a decade and managed to get a master's degree but apparently not in AIDS studies.

[catman]

[nukeday]

See the chart on the right:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV/AIDS#Sexual_contact

However, don't run off to Hooker Hill just yet. Note that those are US statistics only. There is evidence that so-called Asian strains (subgroup E) of HIV are more easily spread via heteorsexual sex. No blood needed, the virus transmits via "langerhans" cells. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langerhans_cell#HIV

Of course, those are all just theories. The reality is, yes, a lot of HIV cases are people that were having a lot of sex, so much so that it's impossible to pinpoint which exposure infected them. This is also why they've had so much trouble figuring out "testing windows," or when someone would show up positive on an HIV test.

As for Magic, let's say having sex with an infected woman is a 1 in 2000 chance in contracting HIV. Let's say he slept with an infected woman (or infected women) 20 times. Now it's a 1 in 100 chance. A long shot, but not impossible. Maybe he is uncircumcised and his risk factor was even higher.

Or maybe he slept with a man, and maybe he was the receptive, more-at-risk partner twice - same odds. 1 in 100 chance. What does it matter? You still shouldn't feel immune. That's getting back into a dangerous 1980s mentality much like some posts have mocked Koreans for - "I'm not gay, so this doesn't concern me."

Magic was a rich, talented sports superstar. Rich, talented sports superstars can sleep with a new woman every night, and maybe he chose the wrong woman as a regular. That fact made him at risk.

The problem with the fear-mongering is it turns people into hypochondriacs after having one one night stand with someone they met at a club, not that it's a completely overblown disease.

[nero]

[grant gerstners]

We are led to believe that AIDS is based on hard science, but there are many in the scientific community pointing out the holes at the theoretical foundations (going back to the early 80's). Here's a good one by a Nobel Prize winning biochemist.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dL3cAS3YUKM

http://www.amazon.com/Dancing-Naked-Mind-Field-Mullis/dp/0679774009/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1296448423&sr=1-1

http://www.amazon.com/Inventing-AIDS-Virus-Peter-Duesberg/dp/0895263998/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1296448378&sr=1-1

Whenever these issues are raised, whether in amazon book reviews or youtube videos, shills for the pharmacteutical companies show up (sometimes with sock puppet accounts). I expect that here as well, now.

Notice, in the comment thread for the above youtube video, the persistence of the illogic and the channel owner's refusal to tolerate logical fallacies in the discussion.

[nukeday]

without reading all that hackery, i'll believe it when these guys start willingly giving themselves and their believers HIV and abstain from current-market anti-retroviral drugs.. If you strongly believe in something....

[Oatmeal Prince]

[UknowsI]

They may be right when they say that it has never been proven that HIV leads to AIDS, but there are plenty of other things that have never been proven beyond doubt. The corralation between HIV and AIDS have been shown very well and a long time ago: http://www.virusmyth.com/aids/hiv/wbscience88.htm *, but it seems to me that the argument is that it might not be the HIV that causes AIDS but a silent passenger which hasn't been detected. However, for many practical purposes that is of little importance as long as we know that people with HIV are very likely to develop AIDS and we know that the current medicine works to keep people healthy. In other words this whole discussion is something that might be interesting for people who are actually researching HIV medicine, but for the rest of the population it will make no difference if we continue to believe that it's proven that HIV causes AIDS.

This is just my impression after a 10 minutes glance, so please tell me if I missed something.

*EDIT: Just to make it clear. I consider the original source from Science as an important contribution and not the anti-HIV comments below.

[bobbybigfoot]

Some interesting videos.

I had a suspicion that something wasn't right, but I had no idea it was all a giant scam.

[nukeday]

Yep, sounds like the winning team. Flat earth society...


Death of HIV-positive denialists

In 2007, aidstruth.org, a website run by HIV researchers to counter denialist claims,[61] published a partial list of AIDS denialists who had died of AIDS-related causes. For example, the editors of the magazine Continuum consistently denied the existence of HIV/AIDS. The magazine shut down when its editors all died of AIDS-related causes.[62] In each case, the AIDS denialist community attributed the deaths to unknown causes, secret drug use, or stress rather than HIV/AIDS.[17][60] Similarly, several HIV-positive former dissidents have reported being ostracized by the AIDS-denialist community after they developed AIDS and decided to pursue effective antiretroviral treatment.[63]

In 2008, activist Christine Maggiore died at the age of 52 while under a doctor's care for pneumonia. Maggiore, mother of two children, had founded an organisation to help other HIV-positive mothers avoid taking antiretroviral drugs that reduce the risk of HIV transmission from mother to child.[64] After her three-year-old daughter died of AIDS-related pneumonia in 2005, Maggiore continued to believe that HIV is not the cause of AIDS, and she and her husband Robin Scovill sued Los Angeles County and others on behalf of their daughter's estate, for allegedly violating Eliza Scovill's civil rights by releasing an autopsy report that listed her cause of death as AIDS-related pneumonia.[45] The litigants settled out of court, with the county paying Scovill $15,000 in March 2009, with no admission of wrong-doing. The L.A. coroner's ruling that Eliza Jane Scovill died of AIDS remains standing as the official verdict.[65]

[thurst]

heh AIDS deniers (denialists is a word?)

but anyway, as someone said, HIV/AIDS is extremely difficult to contract through a single unprotected heterosexual encounter (less than .05%) and truth be told most STDs are the same way, BUT it's prob better that the majority of people don't know.

[Junior]

[Vagabundo]

junior if hiv were that easy to contract, then it would have proliferated among the heterosexual population in the West to African levels or beyond by now. Do you know how many non monogamous people are screwing w/out rubbers and have done so for years and years?

the facts are the facts. It's 1 in 2000, not 1 in 500. you don't have to believe them but that won't change the fact that those are the facts.

fact is the overwhelming majority of hiv positive people in the west are people who got them thru needle use (either drug use or tainted blood transfusion) or gay males.

There are other factors such as cuts, lesions (this would mean if you have another std and are suffering symptoms, that's like having a wound/cut/lesion and your odds of contracting hiv skyrocket). This is what makes it more dangerous for prostitutes as well (on top of the receiver being at more risk to begin with)

and circumcision seems like another factor.

but it's basically 1 in 2000. Doesn't matter that you "don't think so", but it is. They have 20 years plus of data on the matter and only in the last decade has the "truth" come out re how difficult it actually is.

[Vagabundo]

[Junior]