Posted on 03/18/2021 3:17:24 PM PDT by fwdude
The meds use to treat HIV are borderline toxic, I’ve read. They do a number on your body long term. Kidneys and liver are most affected, and bone density is compromised, resulting in being much more prone to fractures and other bone ailments.
You forgot to mention....bisexual hiv+ men having anal “sex” with women. Or iv drug abuser men having anal “sex” with women. In Africa there is reported lots of heterosexual anal “sex”...
Doesn’t have to be anal - closeted bi male (or straight IV drug user male sharing needles) steps out on his wife, contracts HIV, brings it home to his unsuspecting wife. Which is unfortunately far more common in the infection traces than you’d expect or hope. :(
Dyslipidemia...lipodystrophy (high cholesterol)...insulin resistance( diabetes) seen with PIs...long term effects seen..lots of pancreatitis also with other HIV meds..
Drugs are certainly less toxic than uncontrolled HIV disease...but any treated patient still has a lot of monitoring to do. Lifelong burden.
You are correct about the various ways it can be contracted...but vaginal sex alone is low on the...ahem...totem pole...of transmission rates. Has to do with thickness of vaginal muscle wall vs. relative thinness of anal muscle wall..less infected semen to blood contact vaginally versus anal...almost a strict numbers game...either way a true blight on the human experience.
Well, vaginal sex transmission rates may be relatively low per encounter, but it’s still way above zero. Especially as the chances rise with multiple, er, sessions.
The other issue is that there’s a significant minority of women who are into hetero anal sex these days, and the risks for the receiver in anal sex is the same, straight female or gay male.
What was and is particularly nasty (at the time, when I saw it) was in high school and college and you could see infection chains form, where hetero relationships formed and ended and the partners went on to other relationships... and with the latency of HIV, years later people would discover they were infected despite being faithful and not using drugs, because someone down the chains from them had been infected. Of course, at the time, condom use was kind of optional if your steady girl was on The Pill or other birth control... That changed *really* quick through the late 1980s and 1990s.
Then they have to walk the gauntlet of drug resistance, which happens often if treatment adherence isn’t followed closely and consistently. I always wondered why “drug holidays” were a thing among HIV patients, until I learned that the side effects for many were a heavy burden that they looked forward to escaping for short stints. When the virus no longer responds to the prescribed drug, a blind shot is taken with another class of drug, introducing a new set of unsettling side effects and damaging outcomes.
What a life!
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