HIV

Dude still dies.

They also, because of this, they tested him for HIV because they're like, "The only way this happens is he's gotta have some type of immunodeficiency, so let's test him for HIV and see if that was the cause of this." They end up finding a urinary tract infection caused by enterobacteria, also a lung infection.

They think he contracted the immunodeficiency, although they had no idea how it happened.

As the story unfolds, they start finding other strange things out as well.

Why and how, Dr. Duke?

One in which extraterrestrials were aiming to give the entire population of the human race...

Drum roll, please HIV

Oh.

stains on this presidency.

I think it would not be unfair to compare it to what Thelma and Becky did around HIV in terms of the posturing and the misdirection and stuff without actually dealing with a proper crisis.

I don't think it's unfair to make that comparison.

And to declare a national stated disaster without any, apparently according to him, resources to back it up is so shameful.

Those leading the fight against HIV in Fiji are also having to deal with dangerous drug practices, misinformation, social conservatism.

The country's government has declared a national emergency in response to the virus with an estimated one in 60 people infected.

One in 60 was about one in 160 only five years ago.

Adding to that very rapid spread has been a method of sharing intravenous drugs involving one person taking the drug individually.

then drawing blood and injecting it into another person, blue-toothing it's called.

Dr Jason Mitchell is the chair of Fiji's National HIV Outbreak and Cluster Response Task Force.

He joins us now at the Marie Yatra.

So good to have you with us.

In fact, some of them have evolved into helpful genes.

But HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, is a serious example of a retrovirus.

It spreads from person to person through direct contact with certain infected bodily fluids, like blood, semen, vaginal fluids, and breast milk.

It infects the host's T cells, a key part of the immune system.

After entering the host cell's DNA, The HIV DNA can sit silently for sometimes more than 10 years before transcribing back into RNA and making new viral particles.

Low energy? Unfocused? Foggy? You might be dehydrated.

Gatorade Zero powders have been scientifically designed to help improve hydration balance in the body.

This is sick! Avatar Fire and Ash, now streaming on Disney+, rated PG-13,

A number of things, yeah

... yeah, hepatitis C, HIV, and seizures from getting his brain bashed in, basically, in prison.

Yeah.

And I was, I was totally not surprised by this, but he, th- there's a total lack of mental health support.

And you point out kinda two things that are gonna come up a lot.

One is there are, there are ways because these people are prisoners that they can get around stuff like privacy access to discourage treatment.

So for example, Derek has HIV, but there are newsletters that display the names of everyone who goes to the clinic.

Yeah.

On a drizzly overcast week in February, I traveled there to meet with Mike Peluso, an infectious disease clinician and researcher, and his team at the University of California, San Francisco.

When COVID began spreading in San Francisco, Peluso asked his mentor, the distinguished HIV researcher Steve Deeks, to explore whether they could help address the public health crisis.

The pair had been running a long-term observation study of HIV patients.

but the San Francisco Department of Public Health abruptly paused it mid the city's lockdown measures.

With their study on hold and the city under strict stay-at-home orders, Peluso and Deeks devised an idea.

What if they repurpose their existing resources and infrastructure, researchers, study protocols, access to state-of-the-art laboratories to track COVID's long-term impact? we had no idea how SARS-CoV-2 was going to affect health," Deeks told me, referring to the specific coronavirus that caused COVID-19.

But based on their experience with HIV, the researchers knew that infectious diseases are more complex than they at first appear.

Our assumption was that it was going to have some long-term implications.

Um, so this whole time I was thinking about it and I did have a chance to look at that before it coming on.

And I guess I would go back to, I'm a 50 something year old gay man living with HIV.

And I've also experienced homelessness in my life in the 90s.

And from looking back in the 90s to now, I'm looking at the comparisons, not because I'm thinking, oh, we have to get back to somewhere, but I'm looking at like, what are the same problems? What are new problems? How are those problems spinning and changing? And the one thing I would like people to walk away is that The community watches what is done and not done, especially in times of crisis, during the AIDS crisis, the 80s, during this crisis now.

And overwhelmingly, Congress said, no, you are going to keep it.

Because

then again, though, right? Like there were people on both sides that were like, hey, we want to make sure that folks with HIV are housed and cared for.

And that's been incredibly socially.

I used to see a lot of it when I was in California in the, in the eighties.

And the first thing we would suspect is in the early days with HIV, when there were no drugs, so nutrition and like your whole immune system shuts down.

But just recently at the practice, we saw someone with trench mouth and normally, normally it would be maybe a lower socioeconomic person or someone who I think if you were to examine people that have psychiatric problems or people that live on the streets, street people, you might see quite a lot of trench mouth because it's very stressful living in those conditions and normally poorer people.

But we actually have seen cases in these entrepreneurs that have got two and three companies and they're flying all over the world for meetings and not sleeping for weeks on end.