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Reply to "Likelihood of Having Contracted HIV?"
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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Thank you. To answer your question I am in my late 20s. That all makes sense and I appreciate the information. That would explain why I am not offered it annually - I do not meet any of those risk factors and I have actually never been pregnant, so it's never been offered to me at all. That is what scares me. It sounds like since I am not considered "high risk," people don't see it as necessary, but I could have gotten it from a one-time thing five years ago and just have no idea. [/quote] OP, I didn't realize that was you asking. Sorry about that. The place where your reasoning goes haywire is that it is like you are ignoring or not able to digest what the words "high risk" mean. You're not "not considered high risk" via a mistake on your health care providers' part leading to you not being testing and some horrible underlying fact going unnoticed. You are "not considered high risk" because you actually have not done things that put you in danger of contracting HIV. There was a slogan in circulation when I was your age: [b]HIV is hard to get.[/b] It was meant to calm down people who at that point were freaking out that they could get HIV from public restrooms and pools, but it was and is true across a wide range of activities, including heterosexual intercourse with[b] a young man [/b]who is not an injection drug user and doesn't have sex with men. To put this in the context of your anxiety: you are much, MUCH more likely to have contracted hepatitis B via the sex you had than to have gotten HIV that way. Hep B is 50-100 times more transmissible than HIV. Your mind is fastened to HIV for some reason, and it's not a reason that has anything to do with real analysis of risk. You have a contagion thing going here, a worry about pollution. That is anxiety, not your wise mind talking. Get better treatment for the anxiety. [/quote] Curious [b]why you say a younger man is lower risk?[/b] I'd think men in their 40s+ (alive during AIDS crisis) would be less likely to have engaged in unsafe sex in their youth. (I know nothing about AIDS)[/quote] HIV infection is currently permanent. The prevalence increases with age because more people infected with it are added to the population each year and relatively few people in the US die of it anymore. Therefore, all other things being equal, any given person in a group of people who are older is more likely to be infected than any given person in a group of people who are younger. There's a limit to this that corresponds to the availability of drug treatment effectively making HIV a chronic illness. Before that, people who got it almost universally died. If that had continued happening, you'd be right that people who lived through that era would tend to be either uninfected or dead. But it is not that simple. PS You are right that safer sex practices flourished, and now are somewhat on the wane among younger people. But it's not just unsafe sex that transmits HIV, it is unsafe sex with someone who is infected. [/quote]
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