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Lena Gorska

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Should we support national legislations for mandatory, free of charge and confidential HIV testing of everyone who does blood test?

Considering the tragic magnitude and destructive power of AIDS and the general welfare of the society, as well as people who suffer from AIDS or who are HIV positive, should we support national legislations for mandatory, free of charge and confidential testing of everyone who does blood test?

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Topics: AIDS Epidemic HIV health care reform
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  • Antonio Robateau

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    Jan 17 2013: Robert Gallo made his public claim that "HIV Causes AIDS" before any of his peers were able to independently review and repeat his method and result. Requests to do so afterwards were also ignored and his hypotheses became official medical education and profitable patented practice outside of required scientific standards. And when it was finally audited it was concluded that it was contaminated, and included technically "stolen" research from an earlier study which did not conclude "HIV Causes AIDS". I would hardly call that "a well-established theory". Well, financed, yes. But it is well worth revisiting given the failure of so many of the claims' predictions and the abundance of common sense answers.Gays also did not and do not want to be blamed for a lifestyle choice issue. That's politics and marketing, not science.

    • Sebastien De Landtsheer

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      Jan 17 2013: Antonio,

      I do not want to give the impression that your skepticism is not welcomed. Science is, to me, professional skepticism. But you are not very professional. By browsing the web, your research was probably skewed towards websites propagating false information (in the sense: opposite to the truth), understandably more thrilling to read than boring epidemiological records.
      First, you should understand that in the eighties, knowledge of the disease was very limited, and that there was indeed a debate in the scientific community to know if AIDS was really transmissible: transmission rates are very low, symptoms are non-specific and take many years to manifest, and molecular biology techniques were limited. This debate however resolved quickly when confronted with increasing evidence, so stop with the Gallo thing. It is not the first or last time researchers stole each other results or Nobel prizes were questionably attributed.
      I will respond to your comments about the epidemiology, because it is my domain. Africa has much higher levels of sexual concurency than western countries, this is well documented. More partners, more acts per person per year, more overlap. Your comment that "marriage commitments insulate from cross-infection" ignores the reality of widespread liberal behaviors, and western countries are much more conservative on this point. In many African countries, women marry earlier than men, and marriage does not equate sexual commitment (for both partners). This results in a gender imbalance where more women are infected with HIV than men. In western countries, HIV has been driven for some time by male homos (the transmission rate is about ten times higher for anal sex than vaginal sex) and drug injection. This first resulted in a gender imbalance where much more men where infected than women, but as the virus spread to the heterosexual population, this imbalance reduced. Your stats are outdated.
      You can access all peer-reviewed articles on PubMed.

    • Sebastien De Landtsheer

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      Jan 18 2013: And still, you do not adress my main argument. Your hypothesis about non-viral cause for AIDS postulates that all scientists working on HIV (researchers, professors, virologists, epidemiologists, statisticians, technicians, pharmacologists, doctors) are either incompetent, either bribed or otherwise willing to disseminate lies to complete an obscure agenda, either brainwashed to the point that in three decades, none of them discovered the truth. Or maybe is it that some secret organisation is spiking just every sample in the world with synthetic RNA without anyone knowing, actually reproducing the genomic evolutionary pattern of a virus? Oh wait, maybe it is the same devil antechrist that buried fossils in the ground so that we could come up with darwinian evolution?
      Please realize all these theses are ridicule. If you have another explanation for the blindness of millions of people, let me know. I do not say this ironically, I am really searching to understand your line of reasoning.
      Regards,

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