alt Hacker NewsNobody else said it, so I will. Halting HIV transmission is a solved problem if people are willing to give up sex with untested strangers. The same is true of syphilis, monkeypox, and every other sexually transmitted disease. It says a lot about human nature that a small number of people would rather have society spend vast sums of money researching and developing prophylactics and vaccines instead of changing their own behavior, while the vast majority have enough self-control not to catch diseases through random sex.
> The ongoing loss of life and health due to HIV could be stopped if we cared enough to invest resources in...public health education.
It's definitely a problem of caring, but not one of education: there are not honestly many people out there who don't know that random sex leads to diseases, but there are some people who just don't care enough to prevent their spread. If they did care, they would have sex only with known, tested partners. Minimizing harms through additional investment of resources just leads people to continue to fail to care, at society's expense.
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> ... a solved problem if people are willing to give up sex with untested strangers
It's wired into our DNA to do this, and while we can be socialised out of it, you'll never get anywhere close to the near 100% you'd need.
Besides that, PrEP has enabled the return of non-HIV STIs in major cities like Berlin where a lot of the community has returned to raw-dogging since the AIDS-Scare has become a historical artifact.
So in other words… it’s not a solved problem. What point are you trying to make?
Literally no one asks for proof of an STD test before sleeping with them. You might ask someone if they have STDs and use a condom but that’s how 99.99% of how people sleep with other strangers.
Most things are a solved problem if we give up the things that make life worth living. Obesity is a solved problem if you just eat for health. Road traffic deaths are a solved problem if you never leave your house. Suicides are a solved problem if you just don't kill yourself.
This is the brainlet version of the correct take, which is "anal sex without condoms is objectively bad from a public health perspective".
If compliance with safe sex techniques were anywhere close to where it should be, this wouldn't be a problem.
Abstinence has been shown to be an extremely, hilariously, stupidly ineffective strategy in all questions of human sexual health.
The HIV/AIDS epidemic would not have been nearly as serious as it was if people like you and the Catholic Church hadn’t advocated for it over all other measures.
It doesn’t work. Change your mind.
It's not a small number, and like you point out, this is human nature, so asking people to stop is pointless. If people always acted rationally and with empathy for others, everything would be much easier. There would have been no Covid pandemic, no global warming, no drunk driving, and so on.
Yet here we are, needing laws, cops, vaccines, and so on. Asking people to only have absolutely safe sex due to its external effects is about as useful as asking them to stop eating meat due to its external effects.