Should people with HIV/AIDS be allowed to handle food in restaurants?

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Right, but it's also not responsible to portray AIDS as something that regularly kills straight people in the West (except for black chicks).  Should you wear a jimmy hat when you're porking that bar fly?  Of course.  If you don't should you worry you got the HIV?  No.

Well I wouldn't say that.  Big groups of infected people in the US are Gays and IVDAs.  My generalizations are more of a population level type of thing than an individual on a night out thing.  You are correct though in saying if you take some care in who you associate with then your chances of getting HIV even without a condom are minuscule.  The problem with a random girl at a bar is she may be an IVDA or have a bisexual boyfriend.  The chances of that happening if you aren't in the habit of hanging out at scummy bars is definitely much lower.

The problem is that even if the probability is vanishingly low the consequences of it happening are devastating so you kind of don't even want to take that chance.  We have been using the terms risk and probability like they are synonyms.  They in fact are not.  Risk is the probability of something happening multiplied by the negative effect of the outcome.  The risk associated with having unprotected sex with a random woman from even a nice bar is high, but the probability of the ultimate bad outcome happening is low.

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From our friends at the CDC...



In short you are not going to get HIV from eating food at a restaurant.  The very notion is absurd.

First of all, I'm concerned about the spread of AIDS in general, not just among my college-educated heterosexual male demographic.

Good for you.  Unfortunately medicine is complex.  You can't take a one size fits all approach to the entire planet.  The driving forces behind the HIV epidemic in Africa are almost completely different than the driving forces in the United States.  What works to slow the spread in San Francisco is not going to work in Timbuktu and for the most part vice versa.

[Oswald Acted Alone, You Kook]

People, just don't have sex.

Fixed.

[lowtech redneck]

unprotected heterosexual sex is sufficient as a means of HIV transmission to develop into a pandemic

no.

Are you aware that in Africa there was a time when they did mass vaccinations on school children using a single unchanged needle?  I'm going to guess "lowtech redneck" you did not know that.

 

Were you aware that the use of anti-malarial bed-nets drastically increased after donors started charging for them, rather than simply giving them away?  I'm going to guess 'Link' you were too busy slaying Dodongos to pay attention to such things.

Anyway, if that were a relatively major factor, the prevalence of HIV/AIDS would be more evenly distributed throughout the population, instead of being largely concentrated among the most productive age and occupation demographics.  Unprotected heterosexual sex by migratory blue-collars and urban professionals with prostitutes and/or multiple sex partners is primarily what made the disease reach pandemic proportions in Africa.