I am increasingly seeing commercials for a particular pharmaceutical based on a dubious premise. This is of course nothing new… we’ve been subjected to ads for happypills and the like for years now. But this latest one has me confounded. “Truvada” is a drug that will, supposedly, increase your resistance to the HIV virus. Which is useful… I could see this being valuable for people in the medical and police professions. But it’s being marketed to *morons.* The actors in the commercials aren’t worried about contracting AIDS because their jobs demand it, but because they want to just go out and bone and act like fools. Here’s a better idea: how about you don’t intentionally swap bodily fluids with someone who has a transmissible and fatal viral disease?
Imagine an alternate scenario: “Trubola is great because it reduces your chance of contracting Ebola by up to 75%, so go out and make the bloody beast with two backs with people who are bleeding out, right now!”
If that’s insane, why is suggesting it’s ok for people with *other* terrifying fatal diseases to go out and behave the same way? Some would argue that AIDS isn’t the terror it was a few decades ago. But AIDS has not been cured. It has only been managed. Which means the freakin’ virus is still out there living it up, just waiting to mutate into a strain that shrugs off the current cocktail of expensive drugs that hold it off. There will, I think, be one heck of a bloodbath if AIDS finally mutates into an airborne or otherwise easily transmitted form. We’ve had tests for the virus for longer than a lot of the readers of this blog have been *alive;* there’s no good reason why people should have any doubt about the people they’re with, and no good reason why they should think it anything other that stupid to swap fluids with the infected. Hell, how many sane people would bed someone they know has the flu?