And I can’t re-find the article, but I also read that her child is HIV free, thank god, and she is now with a second partner or husband, and they also have an HIV free child.
In the lengthier version, IIRC from the Sydney Morning Herald, the judge’s ruling contains an estimation that she is not likely to live to see her children reach a certain age, and the ruling includes compensation for her first child (though not the second, whose father is HIV free), and most horrifyingly they actually estimate her death year.
Imagine going through all that, with doctors (on your side) having to get up in court and estimate the date you won’t live beyond.
I think that extends to all clergy. The Rev. Rosey Grier visited OJ in prison, and they had a conversation, during which OJ raised his voice, loud enough to be heard outside the room. But no one will ever know what was said then, either.
HIV 1 is long term slow progressor typically with low/no syncissia (if I could spell this word right I would).
Basically it is the type of HIV that stays at latent levels for 5-15 or whatever years without treatment.
HIV 2 is the nasty shit. 1-3 years I believe is all it takes to wipe out the immunesystem.
As for drug treatment… It’s highly variable. It depends on the mutations present in the HIV strain that causes the initial infection. Someone who was infected by someone with late stage HIV 2 they probably will end up getting a multi DR HIV infection and have a rather short life expectancy.
Given the population distribution, and the fact that the guy wasn’t seriously ill yet she probably was exposed to HIV 1, with a regimine of drugs she’s probably looking at 10-15 years before AIDS begins to show up.
I would like to point out that HIV is NOT a lethal pathogen. By itself it CANNOT kill a person. AIDS is however a deadly condition.
As a personal note:
The only upside of my social life is that I haven’t had to sit down with a cute female and explain the risks associated with sleeping with someone in my profession.
THERE IS NO, I REPEAT NO CURE FOR HIV/AIDS AT THIS TIME
Got that? If you have HIV and it progresses to where you lose your immune system cells you will die. All the drugs in the world will only delay the inevitable. Got that? THERE IS NO CURE.
That said, there are drugs that will delay the progression considerably, so people may live 10 or 15 or more years with no AIDS symptoms. This increases their chances of dying of something other than AIDS, but if they have no accidents or other untoward events they will die of AIDS related causes. In other words THERE IS NO CURE.
Now, a very very very few people in this world do NOT get HIV infections no matter how many times they are exposed to the virus. In other words, they are completely immune. This is purely a matter of genetics. You either have one of the magic genes (there is more than one) or you don’t - but it’s not something to bet your life on.
Now, about those drugs… aside from being expensive, and requiring very precise dosing schedules (such that you may be waking up in the middle of the night to swallow pills and so forth) that MUST be followed EXACTLY to get any benefit whatsoever… they also have side effects. Among them: skyrocketing lipid rates (which can rapidly lead to cardiovascular damage, strokes, and heart attacks in some individuals), redistribution of fat deposits (you get stick-thin arms and legs while your torso adds padding and maybe even a “buffalo hump” between your shoulder blades), kidney damage, pancreatic damage (resulting in insulin-dependent diabetes with all its attendant side effects like poor circulation, blindness, kidney damage, heart damage, etc.), and probably other problems. Now, not everyone suffers these side effects equally - but they certainly have the potential to maim and kill.
To top it off - eventually the drug cocktails stop working. They last longer with some people than others (and maintaining that oh-so-precise dosing schedule does seem to lengthen their usefulness) but you’re only buying 10 or 20 years at most. Are those 10 or 20 years worth it? Yeah, probably - if the other side effects don’t kill you first.
In other words THERE IS NO CURE FOR AIDS. Got that?
In some jurisdictions there were complaints about mandatory testing of newborns for HIV since, of course, if the baby has HIV so does the mother - and that somehow violated her privacy
Many people advocate testing ALL pregnant women. Of course, at present there is no way to force them to take drugs to prevent transmission of the virus to their baby - maybe that’s the next step. (Not that I would automatically approve with coercion).
Many states require NO testing prior to marriage - Illinois doesn’t. Or at least they didn’t when I got married about 15 years ago.
Anyhow - AZT will greatly reduce the chances of an infected woman passing the infection on to her child. I was in social work back in the late 1980’s - prior to AZT about 1/3 of the children born to infected mothers also acquired the infection (so the fact the woman in the OP has infection-free children is not so unlikely). After AZT was introduced for pregnant HIV+ women, then infection rates in the newborns droped to about 1-3%. So it really can make a huge difference. Which might be enough to justify the preferential testing of women, whether pregnant or getting married.
Since Crorex hasn’t been back - here’s the CDC’s info on HIV2. You’ll note that HIV2 is actually quite rare in the West - other sites claim that HIV2 is essentially unknown outside of West Africa (IIRC, it centers on Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Senegal, and Gambia). From other reading I’ve done over the years (IANAD, just an interested layperson) it appears that HIV2 is not as virulent as HIV1.
I also don’t quite agree with Crorex’s assertion about the relative times involved in immunodeficiency - although it’s generally true that HIV2 is much less nasty than HIV1, even within HIV1 there seems to be a very wide range of latency periods. At the broadest level, it may be related to which subfamily (or “clade”) one has. (The predominant clade in the industrialized West is Clade B. Clade C predominates in southern Africa and has been theorized to be more easily transmitted heterosexually; I’ve also seen that alleged about Clade E, which is largely restricted to southeast Asia.)
But even within the clades there’s quite a bit of variation. I personally know one “long-term non-progressors” whose immunity, although deteriorating slowly as measured by T-Cell and viral load counts, has remained basically OK for 20 years - and without antivirals. (AFAIK, this guy does not have any of the known immunizing genetic variants.)
It’s possible, though, that because he was infected early in the epidemic, he lucked out and got a weaker version of HIV1-B. One of the tremendous worries about HIV is that its genetic volatility, particularly now that partially effective treatments are available, may result in new superstrains.
THERE IS NO, I REPEAT NO CURE FOR LIFE AT THIS TIME
Got that? If you have life and it progresses to where you get oldyou will die. All the drugs in the world will only delay the inevitable. Got that? THERE IS NO CURE.
Broomstick - thanks for the info. But the women-only test at marriage still makes no sense.
Because any CLEAR test before marriage is totally NEGATED once the marriage is consummated/pregnancy happens, if you don’t know the man’s status in advance.
It reeks of medieval hymen tests to me. I can’t see any logical excuse for not testing both spouses-to-be.
I guess it whooshed by you that I was, in part reacting to a sentiment creeping into the posts that, with the anti-virals, HIV is suddenly “not so bad” anymore. It IS bad. It is still a horrible nasty, vile disease and it still kills people.
Here’s the difference, bub - if I don’t catch any diseases and don’t acquire any disorders that old age you’re talking about may be as far off as 60-70 years for me, and if I take care of myself I may be active, independent, and feeling pretty good up until the very end. More likely, it’s 40-50 years away, and I’ll feel crummy the last year or two.
If I caught HIV tomorrow in all likelihood I would be dead in 10-20 years, and the last 5-10 (if not the whole time period) would be spent choking down dozens of pills daily, in and out of hospitals, with many episodes of pain and suffering, potentially going blind, or crazy from brain damage, and otherwise having a Real Bad Time.
I’m sorry if you can’t understand the difference between a chronic and ultimately fatal disease and a potential half-century of good health.
Did this strike anyone else? She married again! She had another child. Wouldn’t that presume that she would be passing HIV on to her second partner because her first lied to her? So now there are two victims of this ass!
Sivalensis - no, I don’t think so. She found out she was HIV positive with the first pregnancy. Therefore it is likely that the doctors prescribed her the right drugs, and gave her safety advice, etc. So although there are no details, it could be that she and her second partner use condoms, and perhaps used IVF or something to conceive the second child, or perhaps a home method.
Her second partner is HIV free, as are both children. And obviously she was honest with the second partner (unlike her first husband was with her) because of this whole court case coming out.
Even more amazingly there was a small piece in yesterdays Daily Telegraph in which the woman revealed that she had truly loved her former husband and had intended to spend the rest of her life with him and that she forgives him for what he did.
