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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.
i'd expect this to lead to a false sense of security, causing a rise in the casual encounter rate, followed rapidly by a huge growth in the infection rate.
but, i'm paranoid.
If only we could have readers on the street to protect ourselves from these adults' contents. H.I.V-chip
"By the time they had diminished from 50 to 8, the other dwarves began to suspect 'Hungry.'" -Gary Larson
will they be installing everyone else with RFID readers>?
A friend of mine once worked for a company that was making battery operated microarray testing units for the consumer market. Their plan was to sell them everywhere that condoms and pregnancy tests are sold. He claimed the unit could detect HIV/AIDS with 99% accuracy within just a few minutes. Apparently the USA, UK, Germany, Australia and France all banned the units before they even hit the market.. they were worried about discrimination against individuals with these diseases. They sell well in Africa and other countries, though only to doctors, and a positive result is always followed up with a lab test.
How we know is more important than what we know.
The trouble is, with some of these medical issues, that the ethical ways of dealing with the disease are slow, arduous, and sometimes just not effective, which makes the unethical ones a temptation. AIDS is a condition particularly likely to attract extreme schemes, by virtue of being incurable, fatal, and associated(even if often wrongly) by many with various sorts of degeneracy and sin. And this isn't just "oh those crazy primitive indonesians" stuff. Mike Huckabee wanted to quarantine all AIDS patients. Worse, of course, is the fact that it would work, so we have to rely on people's decency to keep them from doing seriously unethical stuff, and who wants to take that risk?
AIDS really isn't unique in this, although it is perhaps the most dramatic case. There are all sorts of diseases that we could attack if we were willing to do some dreadfully unethical things. For the moment, we've mostly resisted the urge; but the danger is always there, just waiting for a bit more stress on the system.
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.
This microchip stuff is really frightening. It reminds me of the tattoos that the Nazis used to track their prison camp inmates. I fear that we are moving to a society where to participate you must be microchipped, and the government will have complete knowledge of your whereabouts and activities.
I'm not a end-times Christian or a conspiracy theorist ( okay, a *sometimes* conspiracy theorist ), but I see this as a stepping stone to a path of complete control over the individual. If you can be electronically identified against your will at a distance, you lose a basic freedom not to be surveilled. You lose a fundamental right to privacy and anonymity.
If the power were in the hands of the individual -- say, I could remove the chip any time I wanted, I could identify anyone I wanted, I could know where the president was and who he was with at any time, then it would be a different story. But of course you can't remove the microchip -- that goes against the whole idea of the thing. To be monitored without your consent. It's power-over. If everyone were microchipped, we would live in a pan-opticon society, where our invisible overlords know our every move.
First it was pets, now it's dangerous disease-spreaders, next criminals and predators, after that children and elderly, in case they get lost, finally everybody, just to walk down the street and buy a drink at the corner store.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Unethical is knowingly sentencing someone to die. There is not difference between sleeping with someone if you think you have AIDS and pulling out a revolver with a single bullet in it, spinning the chamber and then firing at someone.
It is true that some people are innocent who have AIDS. However, these are the victims. It is a horrible chain reaction which may sentence several innocent people to death because of the irresponsible actions of a single individual.
Why would you fear an invisible chip when you are innocent? If you do not intend to pass on this terrible disease which will take your life then why worry? This isn't a small matter of convenience. This is life and death. It is true that some people may find out that an innocent person has AIDS and this may hurt their ability to connect with their family. But this is not likely, and it's completely understandable to someone who has AIDS. What is the cost that others will not die in the way that you have?
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.
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours. - Hunter S. Thompson
Tattoo it to their genitalia. That way, nobody would know except for the people they deliberately tried to infect.
Unless they had an accident, needed surgery & the Doctors / Nurses refused to work on them?
I don't want to Godwin this thread early, but forcible tattooing is really not a particularly civilised idea....
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
It would make the dating scene a lot less scary if you could carry your AIDS chip reader into the club.
It shouldn't. It would be extremely foolhardy to assume that all people infected with AIDS will be chipped. Hell, many people don't even know it themselves (yet). You would be no better off relying on a chip, or a tattoo because of the false negative effect. You still have treat everyone you meet as potentially infected.
The only thing this chip would do is make it easier to persecute the people who have sought medical help for their condition. One obvious side-effect will be that people who suspect they are infected will be reluctant to get tested in order to avoid the stigma of the chip. That's the same reason we have doctor-patient confidentiality - if you can't trust your doctor not to rat you out, then people will seek black-market treatments and the social health problem becomes worse over the long run.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
What is really scary about this is that Indonesia's ID cards includes your religions. In earlier riots in Indonesia, the people rioting would normally stop people on the street and demand to see their IDs. Wrong religion, you are in trouble. Imagine how fun this gets with RFID ID cards, or like here, biotagging. Get a very directional sensor and you could potentially pinpoint the people you don't like in any public crowd. If its possible to read enough of the ID chip on a bit of distance, just hook it to the scope on a sniper rifle and enjoy the fun.
Don't they know you are supposed to start with Pedophiles and TERRORISTS, not AIDS patients. AIDS may be scary, but you are never going to get a color coded threat system out of it.
Only after you stop the terrorists and save the children do you require it for AIDS patients, and senior citizens, and prisoners, and high school students. Then, you require it for "discounts" at the grocery store. That's where the irony starts, I suppose, when you need the chip to get a discount on a box of condoms, because you don't don't trust the chip on the patients.
I'd complain about a slippery slope, but it's much too late. That started when all you people had your dogs and cats chipped. Now it's just a matter of time. Shame on you for bringing about the end times. I hope Fluffy was worth it.
To prove that, when the antichrist shows up, I bet he gets a microchipped pet for his kids. Unless they are alergic, I suppose.
What we really need is a ten day waiting period and a background check before you can buy a congressman.
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
Here's a quick rundown:
1. Most people who have AIDS are actually Heterosexual.
Globally, that's true. The vast majority of AIDS transmission in the 3rd World is via heterosexual sex. 2nd world transmission is primarily hetrosexual sex and IV drug use. 1st World transmission is IV drug use and Homosexual sex, though Heterosexual transmission is rapidly rising, and should overtake Homosexual soon.
2. AIDS is incurable, there is no vaccine, and treatment is generally painful and only delays the inevitable.
True, true, and false. We have no cure for an HIV-infected individual, and there is no vaccine. However, not all HIV-positive people develop AIDS, and there are striking effective theraputic treatments these days (though they're still enormously expensive). Like many other chronic diseases, even with proper anti-HIV meds, HIV reduces your lifespan noticably (to perhaps half of what you would have post-infection). Drug regimes are not painful, and HIV-positive people generally can lead full lives up until the terminal phase of the disease.
3. No one who gets AIDS ever survives it. It has a 100% kill rate.
Not really true. AIDS actually never kills anyone. In and of itself, it doesn't kill. What is does is destroy the immune system, which allows opportunistic diseases to take hold (deadly diseases which normally healthy people can easily resist). Thus, AIDS indirectly kills the host. So you can't really say that AIDS is 100% fatal, since there are a large number of factors determining when/if you get some sort of opportunistic infection.
4. While there are homosexual people who have AIDS, Homosexuality and AIDS are unrelated. However, religious groups attempt to connect AIDS to Homosexuality, when there is none.
Homosexuality does NOT cause AIDS. However, unprotected homosexual sex (e.g. anal sex) has a much higher risk factor than oral or vaginal sex, so the transmission rate for male homosexuals is significantly higher than the lesbian and heterosexual population. Unfortunately, the uneducated (or purposely evil) folks make this correlation-to-causation connection, which is false.
5. If AIDS were transferable through some other common method, such as water, or mosquitoes, and a large majority of the population, if not the entire population of the Human species, we would be extinct within a matter of a few decades.
Possible, but irrelevant. There are many factors involved in the spread of any contagious disease, and I won't pretend to be an epidemiologist. But, if you are looking for a roughly comparable deadly disease, look at malaria. It is nasty, and has many of the long-term implications as does AIDS, yet the human population has survived with malaria for several millenia, at the least.
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
2. AIDS is incurable, there is no vaccine, and treatment is generally painful and only delays the inevitable.
3. No one who gets AIDS ever survives it. It has a 100% kill rate.
True, true, partly true and totally FALSE.
True, hiv IS currently incureable (except for one recent case where the infected person had a bone marrow transplant and some other experimental treatment).
True, there is no effective vaccine against hiv.
True, antiretroviral therapy often causes side effects. But seldom painful side effects and in those cases it is often possible to change treatment.
However, the statement that "treatment only delays the inevitable" is FALSE.
Antiretroviral therapy stops hiv from replicating and if adhered to properly most patients get an improved immune system and can lead a normal healthy life. Even patients who have developed full blown aids can in many cases get an almost fully restored immune system after years of antiretroviral therapy. And those who don't usually improve the immune system so much that they don't die of aids-related illnesses.
Since the treatment only has been available since 1996 it is too early to definitely tell the long term outcome for sure, but all data indicates that most treated hiv-patients which do not have resistent virus should be able to have a normal life span if they adhere to the treatment.
I have met several hiv positive people who have developed aids and had seriously damaged immune systems who after 5-10 years of treatment now have almost normal lab counts and no hiv-related illnesses.
HIV would not make humans go extinct. There are people that are completely immune to HIV. They are nearly impossible to identify because it's unethical to deliberatly infect someone and see if they get HIV. Even with the extreme difficulty in finding the people that are immune several have been identified that at one point had the virus in their blood then it disappeared, indicating they were immune and their body destroyed it. There was even a recent story about an HIV positive, AIDS patient that was given a bone marrow transplant from a person that exhibited immunity and had the virus disappear from their system leaving them HIV negative and making their AIDS go away.
As a result like any other disease if it became widespread and killed most of the population the human species would survive as those that are immune to the disease would simply live on and pass their immunity on to future generations neutralizing the virus threat to the species through natural selection. It's called evolution people and it's a reality.
Malaria hasn't wiped out the humanity in Africa because Sickle cell anemia is the result of two of the genes that prevent malaria. Those who have one of the genes are immune to malaria. Such is true of any disease that affects humanity, none are ever 100% fatal, even at 99.9999% fatal vast numbers (assuming 6.2billion and 99.9999% fatal 620,000 would survive) of people would be immune and survive.