Pentagon May Allow HIV-Positive Recruits, After Mass Firing of Unvaccinated

By Eric Lendrum June 10, 2022

On Wednesday, he Department of Defense (DOD) announced recently that it had updated its guidelines regarding the recruitment of potentially HIV-positive individuals, now opening the door to letting people with the deadly disease serve in the military.

As reported by the Daily Caller, the DOD said that any members who test positive for the virus may continue to serve so long as they do not display any clear symptoms, according to a department memo that was recently made public.

“Individuals who have been identified as HIV-positive, are asymptomatic, and who have a clinically confirmed undetectable viral load…will have no restrictions applied to their deployability or to their ability to commission while a service member solely on the basis of their HIV-positive status,” the memo reads in part. “Nor will such individuals be discharged or separated solely on the basis of their HIV-positive status.”..............To Read More......

Why Is HIV Not Spread By Mosquitos?

By Josh Bloom — October 2, 2018 @ American Council on Science and Health

Have you ever wondered why mosquito-transmitted infections were responsible for shutting down the first attempt to build the Panama Canal (rampant yellow fever) or are able to kill hundreds of thousands of children (malaria) each year in Africa, yet no one has ever been infected with HIV from a mosquito bite?

The answer lies in the nature of the mosquito, but even more so in the nature of HIV.

If you were around during the early days of AIDS, especially in the early 1980s, before the means of transmission was firmly established, AIDS was pure terror. People were worried about eating in restaurants in Greenwich Village, swimming in pools, and even having an infected kid in the same classroom with their children. Looking back it seems almost impossible that Ryan White, a 13-year old boy who contracted HIV from a  blood transfusion in 1984, would not be allowed to return to his school in Indiana because of parents' fear. Even as late as the 1990s the fear remained.

In 1991 Lakers' star Magic Johnson revealed he had contracted HIV and immediately retired. But in 1992 Johnson came out of retirement to play in the NBA All-Star Game. During a mid-court tribute to Johnson, all the players walked onto the floor to hug him - one at a time. The expressions on many of their faces were unmistakable: "I don't want to hug this guy." Other players told reporters off the record that they didn't want to guard him during the game.

Thanks to a greater understanding of the means of infection and (more so) very effective drugs to treat it, the fear of becoming infected has diminished. But the term "fear" would not be even remotely adequate to describe what might have happened if the virus, which can be transmitted from a tiny needle stick, could also be transmitted by mosquitos. After all, when you swat one on a wall you often see blood - someone else's blood. It is certainly plausible that HIV could have been a blood-borne infection.

But we got "lucky." It quickly became clear that mosquitos were not a vector for HIV. Otherwise, we would have seen massive numbers of infections in disparate groups of people rather than in two primary groups - gay men and IV drug users.

Many other infectious diseases are spread by mosquitos (Table 1), and they are mighty nasty. With one exception all of them are viruses. So, why not HIV?

Table 1. Some pathogens that are transmitted by mosquitos

There are a number of reasons why HIV cannot be spread by mosquitos.

HIV is "homeless" inside a mosquito. The property that makes the virus so dangerous to people - an affinity for human T-cells (1) in the blood - also makes it an unhappy guest inside the mosquitos, which do not contain human T-cells. HIV acts by penetrating T-cells and "hiding" inside. In the absence of hiding places, HIV is exposed to and broken down by the enzymes found in the gut of the mosquito.

Just because HIV cannot grow inside mosquitos doesn't mean that other viruses cannot (2). Yellow fever and Dengue can replicate in the gut of the mosquito can then be passed on via the saliva. The same holds true for Plasmodium, the causative pathogen in malaria.

Mosquitos inject saliva when they bite. Living Plasmodium, as well as viruses that replicate in the mosquito gut, make their way from the gut to the salivary glands. This is how these infectious diseases are transmitted. Since the HIV particles are degraded in the gut they do not make their way to the saliva and cannot be transmitted.

Furthermore, HIV is not terribly contagious, especially when compared to other viruses like influenza, measles, and norovirus, which require very few viral particles to cause infection. So even if a minuscule number of viruses survived the innards of the mosquito there would not be enough virus to start the infection.

It may sound strange to think that the world got "lucky" with HIV, especially considering that 35 million people have died of AIDS. But it could have been much worse. Before Saquinavir, the first successful anti-HIV drug was approved in 1995, the death rate from AIDS was 100%. If mosquitos transmitted HIV, the 14-year period between when HIV was first identified and the approval of effective medicines could have easily been a scene from a post-apocalyptic horror movie.

So it is more than a little ironic that the reason that HIV is so deadly is the same reason that it didn't spread all over the world out of control. Viruses are seriously fascinating.

NOTES:

(1) T-cells are a type of white blood cells. They are responsible for fighting infections. HIV binds to a receptor called CD4, which is found on the surface of the T-cell. This is the beginning of the process of infection.
(2) Some viruses simply won't replicate outside of the body while some do easily. This drives virologists insane. For example, herpes and influenza can easily be grown in cultured cells in a dish while it is notoriously difficult to grow hepatitis C and norovirus. It is important to be able to have viruses growing in cells because then you can add a potential drug to see if it stops the replication. This is called a cell-based assay, and is the cornerstone of pharmaceutical research. 

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HIV-Positive School Aide Charged With Sexual Offenses Against 42 Kids -- Liberal Media Silent

By Michael W. Chapman November 30, 2017

Carlos Bell, a 30-year-old former school aide and track coach at two of Maryland's public schools, who is HIV-positive,  has been charged with 206 criminal counts, most of which involved the sexual abuse or exploitation of 42 children from those schools -- and including the federal crimes of producing child pornography -- but the major liberal media have not reported the story, not one word.

Bell was a teacher's assistant at the Benjamin Stoddert Middle School  in Waldorf, Md., and a track coach at La Plata High School in La Plata, Md ., both of which are in Charles County. He was placed under investigation by the Maryland State Police in 2016 after one parent discovered some disturbing texts on her child's cellphone from Bell and contacted the police...........All of Bell's victims reportedly were boys ............To Read More.....

California Governor Jerry Brown To Allow HIV Positive People To Donate Blood

Sean Adl-Tabatabai

California Governor Jerry Brown is expected to give a green light to a bill allowing HIV positive people to knowingly expose their blood to others.  The bill, SB 239, will reduce the penalties for knowingly exposing someone to HIV without telling them, allowing HIV positive people to donate their blood to others. Lawmakers claim the current felony charge for the crime is ‘discriminatory.’
Foxnews.com reports: State Sen. Scott Wiener, a San Francisco Democrat who introduced the bill, said the current law discriminates against people with HIV because people who expose others with different viruses get only a misdemeanor rather than a felony............To Read More.....

My Take - Is everyone in California insane? 

If Putin Is So Great, Why Are So Many Russians Getting HIV?

By Alex Berezow — November 28, 2016 @ American Council on Science and Health

Like an unlucky penny, Vladimir Putin keeps showing up in the American media. From allegations of election tampering to hacking emails, Mr. Putin chooses to stay relevant through notoriety. This has, bizarrely, earned him admirers all over the world.

For many reasons, this admiration is deeply misguided. Mr. Putin heads a kleptocracy and imprisons or murders political dissidents. And, as a shocking new essay in Foreign Policy explains, he fiddles while an HIV epidemic blazes through his country.

Today, there are an estimated 1.5 million people who have been diagnosed with HIV or AIDS in Russia, which has a population of 140 million. Although the spread of HIV has been stemmed in sub-Saharan Africa, in Russia the rate of HIV infection is rising 10 to 15 percent each year — a pace comparable to the infection rate in the United States in the 1980s, when the basic biology of HIV was poorly understood and the antiretroviral drugs used to treat the disease were years away from discovery.

To demonstrate just how backward Russia's public health policy is, let's compare its HIV statistics to those of the United States.

Prevalence is the ratio of people who currently suffer from a disease. More than 1% of Russians have HIV (1.5 million HIV patients in a total population of 143.5 million). The United States has about 1.2 million HIV patients out of a total population of roughly 319 million, which converts into a prevalence of 0.4%. Thus, on a per capita basis, Russia has roughly 2.5 times as many HIV patients as the United States.

The really scary number, however, is incidence, which measures the number of new cases of disease. Public health campaigns in the U.S. have caused the HIV infection rate to flatten. In 2014, there were just over 44,000 new cases of HIV diagnosed in America, giving an incidence of 13.8 per 100,000 people.* In Russia, the incidence rate is 35.7 per 100,000 people, again 2.5 times worse than the U.S. And it's increasing.

Many factors are colluding to create an AIDS epidemic in Russia. According to Stratfor, the problem began mostly with drug users. Now, sexual transmission and drug use share roughly equal blame.

The government's negligence, lack of resources, and refusal to implement modern treatment regimens greatly exacerbate the problem.

For all of its obvious flaws, the American public health system is very good. That is never more obvious than when one travels to a country that lacks even the most basic health services.

*HIV incidence varies widely by U.S. state. CDC data shows that Montana has the lowest incidence (1.9 new cases per 100,000 people), while Louisiana has the highest incidence (36.6 per 100,000). (Washington, DC has an incidence of 66.9 per 100,000). By comparison, the worst regions in Russia, according to The Moscow Times, have an incidence greater than 100 per 100,000 (or 1 per 1,000). 

U.S. Spent $424K on Project Working With Muslim Scholars to Stop HIV Among Prostitutes, Gays, Drug Users in Syria

By Patrick Burke January 30, 2013

(CNSNews.com) -- The National Institutes of Health (NIH) gave $424,062 in tax dollars to researchers who worked with Muslim scholars to develop strategies to prevent HIV infection among prostitutes, homosexuals, and IV-drug users in Aleppo, Syria. The project was not completed because of the outbreak of the rebellion in Syria.  “I’m very disappointed we weren’t able to carry out this project as far as we had hoped, but sometimes things happen and that’s the way it is,” Professor David Seal of Tulane University, the principal researcher, told CNSNews.com. “It’s unfortunate, but human safety comes first.”...To Read More......