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Indonesians Want To Microchip AIDS Patients
Lawmakers in Papua, Indonesia have thrown their support behind a bill requiring some HIV/AIDS patients to be implanted with microchips in order to better monitor the disease. In addition, legislator John Manangsang said by implanting chips in "sexually aggressive" patients, authorities would be in a better position to identify, track and punish those who deliberately infect others. Health workers and rights activists sharply criticized the plan. It would make the dating scene a lot less scary if you could carry your AIDS chip reader into the club.
Prior to the 1950s an epidemic to the magnitude of AIDS would have had those infected with it quarantined and provided with free medical care. That is free drugs, and a clean sterile environment so they could live as pain-free as possible.
Today we let them go about their business and charge them extravagant rates for medications which is beyond the ability of many to pay.
99% is not good enough for something as rare as AIDS.
It completely depends on the way you use the information.
If you decide to forgo sex with anyone who shows a positive reading, whether a true or false positive, you've just cut down your rate of exposure by 99%. Sure that still leaves the other 1%, but as long as you don't take a negative reading as justification to have unprotected sex, you are no worse off than you would be without the tester.
Is everyone smart enough to use a test like that? No, but you can only do so much to cater to the stupidest people of society,I say the chances are those are the same people that would have unprotected sex anyway.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Any other view would would be akin to a protecting a serial killer because you used to room with the guy and you're afraid of the social stigma.
Or we could just be protecting the witches, the anarchists, the commies, the blacks, the hippies, the Michael Bolton fans, and the AIDS patients because we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.
The stigma associated with HIV/AIDS is so great in Indonesia that many people who are infected with the disease refuse to seek medical assistance because they are too ashamed - I know because I am Indonesian and have met such people.
What the Indonesian government needs to work on is to remove the stigma of HIV testing and the use of condoms and to educate people about the disease.
Threatening HIV positive people with a chip implant will achieve exactly the opposite and instead and will simply put HIV positive people into hiding and make it that much more difficult to educate these people about how the disease is transmitted - think about people who believe that having sex with virgins heals you of HIV or the South African minister who admitted to having sex with an HIV positive woman but took a shower afterwards to reduce chances of infection - these are the exact same people who need to be educated and not alienated