Wipe out AIDS today!

Ok, what if all HIV positive people died today?

Here is the scenario: A drug company, while trying to find a way to combat HIV by making it mutate into a sterile virus, stumbles onto a way to make it mutate into a immediately deadly virus. They take the discovery to the president or UN. Is it used with the justification of saving millions of lives?

It would ceast to exist in the human species. Everyone alive is clean and the only HIV would come from having sex with monkeys? How many lives would be spared over the next 20 years? Would it be worth it? Who would make the decision?
Would it slowly creep back into the species in a mutated form.

I know everyones knows the sweetest poor boob in the whole world who just happens to have caught it. They were innocent and blah, blah, blah… Would you sacrifice them to save everyone else who doesn’t have it.

Well…why not save the R&D and just put them in front of a firing squad Justinh ? Might as well get rid of TB and hepatitis while we’re at it. Hell let’s just kill everyone that isn’t a member of this message board. (and some of them too)

Would it also mutate into a more contagious virus, so it spreads like wildfire (and only to people who already have HIV)? I just don’t see thousands of AIDS patients taking a drug that is intended to kill them.

In any case, I would definitely do more research on this mutation. If they can make it immediately deadly, it’s very plausible that they could still find a way to make it sterile.

Or am I taking your hypothetical too seriously?

I perceive the following assumption in the OP:

“People who have HIV got it because they had unprotected sex, and they deserve to have HIV, as their punishment for having unprotected sex, and therefore they deserve to die.”

Is this correct?

Mr2001,
Well of course you dont tell the AIDS patients what you are doing.
Well what is the idea of spending money on the research anyway? Is it to save the most people possible or is it to save the currently infected.

Lets make it simple. You develop this “vacine” and tell the UN “you can have this now or wait til we come up with something better. While you wait, 20 million more will become infected in the next year”.

And on your question of mutating worse than wildfire. Yes that is possible. That is a real possibility right now. No one talks about it. but it is a distinct possibility.

Sweet WIlley,
What is your proposal? Just close your eyes and wait for it to be cured while millions die?

I am just offering a thought.

D D Goose,
I am not judging whether they deserve their fate or not. I am just saying they have a death sentence already and the only way to prevent distributing this sentence to millions more is to stop the virus from spreading.

Well, that would raise some pretty nasty ethical questions. I don’t know of very many people who would say that, if someone has a fatal or probably fatal disease, assuming that person is in full control of their facilities, that it’s ok to kill them. Also, right now, about 40 million people worldwide are estimated to be infected with HIV. The death of so many people so quickly would overwhelm burial capacity and have a major blow on the world’s economy.

It’s been tried before. The protagonist was Nazi Germany.

Hmmm, what if we devise a test for all known genetic disorders which can be passed on to offspring - and we also devise a drug to “fix” these disorders in the potential parents which actually kills them instantly. We should certainly do our part to stop these genetic misfits from passing on these nasty genes, shouldn’t we? I mean, sure they’re innocent people (well, most of them), but think of the millions we could save from lives of misery from this point forward! Ethics be damned!

Or, what if by capping justinh and his loved ones, somehow it would miraculously end world hunger… do tell, Justin, would it be ok to kill you?

justinh wrote:

You demonstrate your ignorance beautifully in this passage. Anyone with the least concern for and knowledge of the current status of HIV/AIDS research and treatment knows that the contacting of this virus is no longer necessarily a death sentence, particularly for those who have access to the latest drug cocktails.

How would you convince people to take the vaccine after it killed off every single person infected with AIDS that it was given to first? “Sure, of the first 20 million people who had AIDS that we gave this to, they all died, but that’s no reason to think that it won’t work in your case”.

Why is that necessary? Is everyone else going to get AIDS unless we find a cure?

Under your plan, the 40 million that currently have AIDS will be murdered reltively quickly. This will, if it works, save numerous other millions of people from having AIDS.

Currently, there are drug cocktails available to prolong the life of AIDS sufferers, and to enhance their quality of life as well. It stands to reason that these measures will improve as research continues. At the same time, education about safe sex can decrease rates of infection, decreasing the potential benefits of your plan. I’d say that closing my eyes and waiting, while current efforts to combat AIDS continue at the current pace is a far superior solution to genocide.

Where does this number come from? There are about 40 million people with AIDS. What would lead you to the conclusion that half of them are likely to infect someone else?

And since when is the only means of preventing HIV from spreading to kill off all people with HIV? We’ve known for a very long time how to prevent the transmission of HIV - we just don’t care to spend the money it would take to provide HIV/AIDS education programmes and treatment programmes to Third World nations.

Leaving aside the Rainbow Six elements of the proposal, do you really think any First World nation cares enough about the people in Third World countries dying of HIV/AIDS to spend money on exterminating them when our apathy will achieve the same result?

And, as already mentioned, you’d better add a whole host of potentially fatal diseases to your list because the only way we can ensure that they don’t spread either is to kill off all of those currently infected.

I am left aghast at the OP. (And my answer to it would be, “No.”)

Esprix

**
Oh. Is that what you call it?

**
So are you. So is everyone. It’s just a question of when. To quote a phrase that I’m sure you’ll recognize, “Many that live deserve death and many that die deserve life. Can you give it to them?”

**
By killing them off? Bullshit. Before you spew garbage, you ought to at least a vague idea of what the issues are. AIDS is thoroughly wimpy as far as epidemics go. Though even an untreated host can spread the disease for years, it is extremely difficult to catch. With a bit of education and some very modest spending on public health, transmission rates can be cut to near zero. A few countries in Africa have, indeed, implemented programs like this with excellent results.

Even assuming AIDS weren’t treatable (which it is) it is easily preventable. Therefore, there is no need to commit mass murder to “save millions of lives.”

It’s frightening, isn’t it? To see that someone like justinh wouldn’t even attempt to disguise his views by presenting his “question” in more of a hypothetical disease scenario?

Sure scares the shit out of me!

Your suggestion does not pass our minimum standards of integrety.
Therefore, your submission does not meet our current needs.

We wish you every success in your future endeavours, provided you limit you experiments to yourself only.

Thank you for your suggestion.

This is a horrible solution to a horrible problem. But it is a possible solution. I have not seen any other workable solutions. Thats what I am looking for.
If it was so simple as education then it would be eradicated in the industrialized countries. I don’t see any evidence of this.

And if its a whimpy epidemic then how can so many be so whimpy as to catch it?

yes it is treatable. THen I guess nobody dies from it anymore in the US?
yes it is preventable. Then nobody gets it anymore in the US?

The only way to get it is from someone who has it and is being treated (not cured). The longer they live the more they infect. SO how do you stop them from infecting others?

Options:

  1. Pity
  2. Education
  3. death
    any others.

Perhaps we should have a Great Debates meta-FAQ, which would include the following:-

For any question of the form “Is mass slaughter/mass deportation/mass imprisonment acceptable in (some set of circumstances)?”, the answer is “No”.

And, justinh, you say you “have not seen any other workable solutions”. In what possible respect is your solution “workable”? Do you expect everyone with HIV to line up meekly for the slaughter? What about people who don’t know they’re infected?

Let’s not tar and feather Justinh just yet. At the risk of giving him too much credit, I am going to take this question seriously. I am assuming that he is viewing the spread of HIV with amoral logic and and a hypothetical point of view, rather than a mad-scientist Joseph Mengeli point of view.

Quarantines are designed to protect the greater population, and they operate on similar reasoning to the OP. If the human resevoir can be isolated, it prevents the virus from spreading outside that resevoir (assuming that, like AIDS, there is not another vector). What justinh seems to be suggesting is a “death quarantine” where the virus is isolated because the infected are killed and disposed of rather than merely sequested in a leper colony. If HIV was ebola, smallpox, or the swine flu, this might work. It’s one of the most morally repugnant scenarios I can think of, but it might work.

However, HIV is not any of these bugs. It is a retrovirus capable of lying dormant in the human body for years. It is undetectable by the currently available antibody tests until it “awakes” and provokes an immune response. Therefore, standard blood tests will never catch all those infected - only those who have already begun to produce antibodies to HIV. There will be a small but signifigant segment of people that will test negative and escape the HIV Extermination List (HELL) - yet develop the syndrome at a later date. From these few, the disease may spread again, especially if the general population grows lax in prophylactic measures due to an overconfidence in the completeness of HELL.

Now, what if some other method was used to test for the virus itself - such as a Southern Blot; or as the OP suggested, a magic bullet “anti-vaccine” was developed that killed all those infected with the virus. The Extermination Vaccine decreed by International Law (EVIL) would have to be administered to all 6 billion people on the planet. Since EVIL does not provide immunity to HIV, it would also have to be administered to all 6 billion people within a matter of months in order to prevent cross infection from those who have not yet been given EVIL to those who had already been given EVIL. This is a logistical impossibility, for if one small infected segment of the population slipped through the bureacratic cracks, AIDS would spread again, especially if the general population grew lax in prophylactic measures due to overconfidence in the infallibilty of EVIL.

So, death quarantines would not work on a global scale, but what about a smaller one? There is an interesting ethical question here, for these types of drastic measures are not without precedent during times of plague. In 1720, an act of parliament attempted to isolate Marseilles by levying the death penalty as punishment for any communication between the city and the rest of Provence. (http://www.beyond.fr/history/plague.html)

Now, Imagine you are a member of a small English colony sent to the New World. Small Pox has broken out, killed a quarter of the population, and infected another quarter in a matter of weeks. The colony does not have the resources to combat the disease, nor does it have the facilities for a quarantine. Banishment means certain death. Panic is breaking out as the population dwindles; what do you do?

On a side note, in Virtual Light, Willian Gibson imagines a clever take on an AIDS vaccine. The virus had produced many, many, variants through mutation and one was found to be both non-fatal and non-symptomatic. It was then injected into the population at large because it also provided immunity to the other strains. It looks like his idea has even more merit than he might have thought: http://www.nih.gov/news/pr/oct2001/nichd-31.htm