Hey Medical Community! Are you listening?!

This next blog is a series of email responses I made in a conversation with a friend of mine. We were discussing my afternoon in which I participated in Vanderbilt Hospital's effort to inform people about the trial HIV vaccine. For more (accurate) information, please visit their website.

Here is my side of the conversation:

The event went well. I did meet some cool people. It wasn't as well attended so it was a short time at the booths. But I did learn about the HIV vaccine. It's still in the trial stages and Vanderbilt Hospital has been running it for 20 years. They had a big bust (i.e. a trial that failed) in 2007 so they're starting over this year. They basically inject 3 parts of DNA from the HIV virus into a person's bloodstream to see how the person's immune system reacts. The theory is that if the human body recognizes the 3 proteins of DNA when the actual virus hits the blood, the body will already have a trained defense. There are 3 stages of this trial and they're only in stage 2 right now.

Of course, being around all this disease talk is making me paranoid. I am a hypo, after all. But TN is experiencing another syphilis outbreak. (We're #1 in the nation! We're so proud...) Listening to all this stuff, it makes me want to be celibate. I mean, jesus, my idea of foreplay now would be an exchanging of paper test results from either planned parenthood or a physician.

And now they're saying that Oral Herpes (HV 1) and Genital Herpes (HV 2) are interchangeable. So since over 80% of the U.S. population is already infected with Oral Herpes, that means that currently, or in the future, over 80% of the population will be infected with Genital Herpes. Sighs.....I'm inheriting a bankrupt country, a broken healthcare system, AND multiple STD epidemics. Sometimes, it just doesn't pay to get out of bed, ya know?  

The good news is that syphilis they can treat. As long as you're not allergic to antibiotics (and haven't abused them with over-prescriptions), you're good to go. The problem with syphilis, as well as all the other STD's, is that you can be asymptomatic for a long period of time. During that period of time, you can infect everyone you have unprotected sex with.

And I've come up with a solution. I don't know why this hasn't been a solution. We teach sex education and that works part of the time. But most people who are having sex aren't necessarily thinking of their sex ed class. So mistakes get made. Mistakes will always get made.

So looking at the rising number of infections, I'm still wondering why STD and HIV testing is still voluntary. What the fuck is wrong with our medical community in that they would allow this to be voluntary. The only time an HIV test is administered involuntarily is when a woman is pregnant. Other than that, if you don't specifically ask for testing, you won't get tested.

I think that starting at ages 11-13, when the doctor takes blood and urine, as it per usual, they run HIV, syphilis, chlamydia, gonorrhea, and, if they can, herpes. Every single time they come in for a physical. We know kids are having sex that young and if 35 year olds can forget to put a condom on, you can bet your ass that a 13 year old will forget as well. There's nothing to report unless there's a positive.

I honestly believe if we make STD tests mandatory and yearly, we could catch the positives earlier, inform the infected, which would hopefully stop the spread of the disease from that person. Most transmissions are done b/c people simply do not know they're infected. This would decrease the ignorance. and hopefully, the spread. Make the ad campaign similar to cancer. Catch cancer early, live another day. Catch an STD early and your spouse gets to live another day.

But I don't hear anybody in the medical field talking about this. There's still too much stigma in this puritan nation about sexual health. We're literally dying and our medical community is failing us. Just pisses me the fuck off.