Rare Drug - Resistant HIV Found in N.Y.

NY Times ^ | February 11, 2005 | NA

[neverdem]

Intelligent Design?

At least a Darwin Award!

[SalukiLawyer]

Well, some of the things I know about meth is that it is sometimes injected, and people who are on it usually look pretty scabby and scuzzy. I think it is simpler than the meth causing "mutations." I think you do a lot of drugs, you're going to get sick.

[neverdem]

I'm guessing meth helped to alter the AIDS strain.

I'm not inclined to think so. Meth works very much like adrenaline(epinephrine). I'm more inclined to think it stressed the immune system besides lose the inhibition about doing stupid acts.

[lainde]

bttt

[neverdem]

Here's the Times version.

Rare and Aggressive H.I.V. Reported in New York

[dervish]

And lesbians, a group least likely to get AIDS, but who can get breast cancer, are at the front lines campaigning for AIDS money.

[uncbob]

Of course using drugs in and of itself could not possibly have an effect on someone's immune system. I am always amazed how regularly these hysterical AIDS articles come out in the press, counting on the fact that everyone will have forgotten the last everyone-in-Africa-is-already-dead-of-AIDS-and-straight-white-folsk are-next story, and the thousand before that as well.

Not just Africa
If you read the studies back in the 80s published in American Scientific journals half the USA would have been dead by now

AIDS is the biggest scam going

15 Billion to AFRICA ( Drug companies cash cow ) to cure so called AIDS when it is the same diseases they have been dying from for years but now everything is called AIDS

[hinckley buzzard]

Hat's off to you, Ash, yer doin' it right! Trust me when I tell ya, you'll be glad you did.

[Wally_Kalbacken]

Thanks - that very good information. Looks like it costs $12-15K for keeping a patient on the antiviral "cocktail" of drugs for one year. I don't know what the lifetime costs for an AIDS patient are, but this is good to know.

I find this to be the classic bureaucrat's view of a government program "saving" money. They are taking general revenue dollars to keep a patient's private insurance going (paying the private insurance premium already in place with tax dollars, rather than letting the patient drop the insurance and go 100% on the back of the taxpayer) - and they celebrate the savings that this represents over direct state Medicaid payment for the treatment. It can only be regarded as savings if you assume that the seropositivity of some number of people in FL is a given. It's as if we need to declare victory and celebrate Florida's use of private insurance - when in fact all they are doing in is spreading the cost over a larger pool (the universe of the insured in a given patient's private insurance). So - Florida taxpayers win and all private insurance carrier insured lose. You have spread losses to some undefined group outside the jurisdiction of FL. But of course all other states are doing the same to other states, including FL.
The prospect of saving money by eliminating the behaviors that contribute to seropositivity in the first place - not considered. This is the insanity of AIDS policy.