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Not good encouragement for anyone. Teach prevention
Yes, there is life after an HIV diagnosis. The lingering stigma may hark back to the 80s and 90s when HIV was almost an assured hideous death sentence. I'd never tell anyone living with HIV isn't so bad because the goal would be never to contract it in the first place.
+since2003 Perhaps many medical professionals aren't on board with U=U because there are still a lot of problems with it. Consider these questions. - Is "undectectable" a permanent, static condition? - How many "undetectable" people become detectable between Dr visits, and how many people have they put at risk in the interim? - "undetectable" is a self-declared status. Does another person at risk have some right to ask for proof?
@JayPee138–I completely agree with what you wrote—particularly the last sentence. It had a huge impact on my personal life last year on the heels of falling in love (after 17 yrs resigned to aloneness) and then full disclosure, and no rejection. I learned my partner would be well protected by my med compliance. Found something in a POZ article. Confirmed with doc. Had heard nothing from med care team prior to this. Delighted with research news, but disappointed with the non-distribution chain.
It’s still a disease well worth avoiding at all costs. So quit stigmatizing my personalized strategies of prudent avoidance as “stigma.” It’s none of your business. “My body, my choice,” right?
This is sad. I hate to say it, but the problem here is PrEP (sorry not sorry). While everybody’s been paying attention to PrEP for the last several years, due to heavy advertising and the claim that it’s such a huge step forward for the community (it’s not, in fact I’d say it actually increases stigma and isn’t even necessary in a lot cases), few people outside the community actually paid attention to the REAL step forward, which was the announcement that undetectable equals untransmittable.
Andrew
Of course they think its The End of the World. There's no shortage of "prevention advocates" describing PrEP as "life saving". A prominent gene therapy group recently gave an interview where they exaggerated the cost of HIV treatment as justification for the cost of their possible cure. Stigma isn't just crazy conservatives and "uneducated people" It also comes from a lot of what gets called "advocacy". If anything, the latter group is more insidious because it goes unchallenged.
July 23, 2021 • Cleveland