Yeah. HIV is a good example of this. Without treatment, it is deadly pretty much 100% of the time. However, it takes a long time after the shut down of the immune system before a systematic infection takes over and kills you.

That allowed for a deadly disease that's somewhat hard to spread (mostly just through sex) to ultimately go on a rampage.

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AbstractH24 an hour ago | parent [-]

I never thought about this.

So without concern for the humans with HIV* there an argument to be made that treating symptoms without curing made it spread more?

*obviously, this is just hypothetical. It’s important to care about the life of those with HIV. No banish them all to something like a leper-colony. Although it explains the logic for those at the time they existed better than a religious one did.

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cogman10 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

HIV specifically targets the immune system. There's no way to just treat the symptoms.

The treatments we have now also decrease the risk of spread significantly.

It's a bit like the chickenpox. Once infected, you always have chickenpox ready to burst out in the future as shingles. But for the most part, it's dormant and you aren't infectious.

HIV treatment does the same. It doesn't clear your body of HIV, but it does decrease the HIV load to such low levels that it can be undetectable. That, in turn, decreases the likelihood you'll spread it.

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AbstractH24 an hour ago | parent [-]

These are relatively recent advances. But for the longest time wasn’t that case.

	▲	cogman10 17 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		HIV has only really been known for ~40 years. And for at least 10 to 15 of those years research into treatment was limited and stigmatized as it was considered a "gay disease". The modern treatment regime was developed around 2010. That is, about 15 years. I'd argue that with the timeline of the disease that's not recent. What's become more recent is the mass availability of treatment and the significantly reduced cost of treatment.

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marcosdumay an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> So without concern for the humans with HIV* there an argument to be made that treating symptoms without curing made it spread more?

No, because HIV treatment is about killing the virus, and we don't have any that only treats the symptoms.

But there is an argument like that for the flu and colds.