• randon31415@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    Strangely, medical privacy is the reason anyone still dies from HIV. For the cost of 10 cents per person, we could test every human in the planet and make that information public. The transmission rate goes down (1/10th) if the infected person knows, and goes down further with the right immunosupressents (by a factor of 1/100). Publicly available data might even push that to 1/1000. The transmission rate is around 1, so that means it would be cut to 1 new infected per 1000 cases.

    Within the standard life expectancy of a hiv carrier, we would go from 40 million to 40 thousand cases.

    • frustrated_phagocytosis@fedia.io
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      3 days ago

      Even an incredibly accurate tests would result in thousands of false positives that would now be public knowledge. As difficult as it is to correct anything involving government records, you can imagine the fallout from that. Plus some with medicated HIV won’t show as HIV positive in blood tests anyways.

      • chingadera@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        /theydidntdothemath

        Whatever percentage of positive tests would have a second and possibly tertiary test to confirm and rule out false positives for a whopping (guessing here) 10.03 cents per person

    • Catoblepas
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      3 days ago

      “Medical privacy is the reason anyone still dies from HIV”—goes on to describe a scenario with universal testing and medication access, neither of which currently exist. 🤨

      Btw, treated HIV does not have a 1% transmission rate. Undetectable = Untransmittable.