An 87% reduction in risk for condoms sounds pretty good--at least until you think about it.
Would an ABM system that could intercept 87% of incoming missiles be good enough?
Well, if nobody is firing missiles at you that is definitely good enough.
If none of your partners is infected with HIV, 87% protection is also definitely good enough.
Consider the current HIV outbreak in the porn community. Darren infected two women during his initial highly contagious phase of the disease. Assume that there was no systematic testing in place. It is likely that each of the women would have infected a male in turn. (Female to circumcised male infectivity is thought to be about half what it is in the other direction.) Then it is likely that those two males would have infected two more women each--four women in all. You can see where this is going. In physics this is called a chain reaction. In public health it is called an epidemic.
Testing put a stop to the whole porn business with only one male and two females infected. This is equivalent to shutting down the reactor when it starts to run away. The epidemic is stopped in its tracks.
Now if condoms had been used infectivity would have been around 10% of what it appears to be in this case. Darren would have probably infected no women and at most one woman. It is very unlikely that any additional males would have been infected. Reaction damped. No epidemic--even in the absence of systematic testing.
The purpose of condoms is to damp out infections so that we don't get epidemics. They are not good enough to completely protect you if you should be unfortunate enough to run into a HIV-positive partner who is highly infective because he or she is in the early stages of the infection or has a coinfection that increases the probabiliity of HIV infection.
The only completely safe sex is sex with an uninfected partner. Your safety depends more on everyone else using condoms so that chain reactions (epidemics) are damped than it does on you using a condom.
The preceding is especially true now that we are seeing HIV positive individuals on drug therapy being sexually active (and often without using protection because they wrongly thing they have nothing to lose--wrongly because it is possible to be reinfected with a second substrain of HIV).
Think about that for a while.
Not much news yet other than she uses the name Jennifer and almost always worked with condoms in her professional life. (See link.)
A good time to be careful in Los Angeles.
I've always considered the porn industry to be like the canary in the mine. When the canary keels over it is a good time to head for the nearest exit.
I'm sticking to FBSM until June.
Mathesar
in our community.
I have decided that I will post my response.
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It would all be guesswork. There have been HIV surveys of brothel workers in other countries. In general they tend to have HIV infection rates that are high compared to the general population. However, they also tend to be lax about condom usage and have boyfriends who are IV drug users even if they don't use IV drugs themselves.
Look at the porn industry. Nobody tested HIV positive since 1999 and now we have four within a month. I imagine that with testing that all the HIV positive individuals will be excluded from working and then it may be years before someone introduces an infection from outside the local porn community again.
I think (but cannot prove) that our community is similar to the porn community (but with more condom usage and less testing).
Unless (on average) each infected person infects at least one new person the disease dies out of the population (until a new infection from outside the community comes along). If each person infects more than one person you potentially have an epidemic.
The number infected in the community is not constant over time. The fact that about 0.5% to 0.7% of the general population is infected isn't much help.
As the Discover article indicated you can't predict how a disease will spread or what levels of infection will be reached in the population without knowing a lot about the network of contacts that is spreading the disease.
I see articles on this kind of modeling in the journal Sexually Transmitted Diseases, but I don't see anything that would allow me to draw any conclusions about the population in our community that are any better than just guessing.
An 87% reduction in risk for condoms sounds pretty good--at least until you think about it.
Would an ABM system that could intercept 87% of incoming missiles be good enough?
Well, if nobody is firing missiles at you that is definitely good enough.
If none of your partners is infected with HIV, 87% protection is also definitely good enough.
Consider the current HIV outbreak in the porn community. Darren infected two women during his initial highly contagious phase of the disease. Assume that there was no systematic testing in place. It is likely that each of the women would have infected a male in turn. (Female to circumcised male infectivity is thought to be about half what it is in the other direction.) Then it is likely that those two males would have infected two more women each--four women in all. You can see where this is going. In physics this is called a chain reaction. In public health it is called an epidemic.
Testing put a stop to the whole porn business with only one male and two females infected. This is equivalent to shutting down the reactor when it starts to run away. The epidemic is stopped in its tracks.
Now if condoms had been used infectivity would have been around 10% of what it appears to be in this case. Darren would have probably infected no women and at most one woman. It is very unlikely that any additional males would have been infected. Reaction damped. No epidemic--even in the absence of systematic testing.
The purpose of condoms is to damp out infections so that we don't get epidemics. They are not good enough to completely protect you if you should be unfortunate enough to run into a HIV-positive partner who is highly infective because he or she is in the early stages of the infection or has a coinfection that increases the probabiliity of HIV infection.
The only completely safe sex is sex with an uninfected partner. Your safety depends more on everyone else using condoms so that chain reactions (epidemics) are damped than it does on you using a condom.
The preceding is especially true now that we are seeing HIV positive individuals on drug therapy being sexually active (and often without using protection because they wrongly thing they have nothing to lose--wrongly because it is possible to be reinfected with a second substrain of HIV).
Think about that for a while.