Aswad
Posts: 9374
Joined: 4/4/2007 Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: asubmissiveheart Interesting thread, many people enjoy rolling the dice when it comes down to their health. Yeah. But there's also a difference between rolling a single one, and going for Yatzee the first time around. As I pointed out, referencing HIV, the risks are great on a population level, but not much greater than certain kinds of edgeplay on an individual level. For a population as a whole, it can become an epidemic, as demonstrated in Africa. And it is certainly a public health issue. That, and a recent survey among women showed that only about half of them would disclose having STDs to a potential partner before unprotected sex; I imagine that the numbers for men are similar. Again, though, the risks with unprotected sex are present, regardless of the precautions. Which is not to say the precautions are worthless (they aren't), just that they don't eliminate the risk, and that the remaining risk may be more than most of us are willing to live with. But I would say that people overestimate the risk, much like with plane crashes vs car crashes; you're more likely to die in a car crash, but a plane crash is more dramatic and gets more coverage. Some even worry about HIV infection from urine, of which there hasn't been a single recorded instance, and where some in the medical community have stated that the virus concentration is simply too low to cause infection. Heck, blowing a random stranger off the street has a 1 in 1.500.000 risk associated with it. Breakdown: 1 in 10.000 if the person has HIV, which about 0.6% of the population has. That said, there are many other STDs that are much more likely to be a problem. In short, use facts and numbers, rather than fear, uncertainty and doubt. Being risk-aware means doing what you can to estimate the risk. Life itself is a risky proposition; it kills many people every day. Pick the level of risk you can live with, and throw the dice. P.S.: In certain subpopulations, there is a gene that confers a greater resistance to HIV, one that is derived from their ancestors having survived the bubonic plague.
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"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind. From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way. We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.
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