These Infections Lead to Many Cancers Among People With HIV

pozmagazine:

These Infections Lead to Many Cancers Among People With HIV

Herpes virus, Epstein-Barr virus, and human papillomavirus (HPV) can put you at a raised risk for Kaposi sarcoma (KS), lymphomas, and anal and genital cancers if you’re living with HIV.

In fact, in recent studies, these types of infections were a particularly notable cause of cancers among patients 20 to 29 years old. As a risk group, MSM had the highest proportion of infection-related cancers.

So, I think that smoking cessation is an important public health goal, but I think that the recent focus on smoking for people with HIV is based on a Danish study, and is kind of missing the point that in the US we need to first and foremost improve access to treatment. Because for many of these infection-related cancers, the only option is close monitoring and cART to prevent immunosupression.

Also, I didn’t realize that there weren’t good screening tools for anal HPV. All the more reason to vaccinate going forward.

In response to Fansplaining #8

http://fansplaining.com/post/132542751643/flourish-and-elizabeth-try-and-possibly-fail-to

You seem so dubious about reading fic without knowing the canon, so I wanted to present myself as a case study.

But I guess first I need to talk about gif sets as a vector of fandom. Because they are 100% a transformative work, but also probably the most dependent on the high-budget media machine. Because it takes so much money to get so many beautiful talented actors together, and the costumes and the make up and the cinematography and the special effects. So, obviously not divorced from the production cycle.

But I have two kids and an obscenely long commute and if I get past a certain level of sleep deprivation I turn into a rage monster, so I haven’t seen a movie in the theater in literally five years. My husband I eke out a little time to watch something on Google Play after we’ve put the kids to bed, but it’s got to be something we can both stand, something engaging and not too gorey, but also not too serious.

And after I started seeing a lot of Cherik gif sets and fic recs, I made a push for us to watch the new X-men movies because I thought it would make the fic that much more enjoyable, but the movies were just so disappointing compared to what fandom was doing.

The rollercoaster plots of action movies are driven by a lot of terrible shit happening, but the movies never seem to really take the trauma and grief seriously, unless they need it as a plot point, in which case it always seems to be done in the most ham-handed way.

And they seem to be totally oblivious that their movies are epic tragic love stories. Which is why gif sets are so important, because once you get the footage away from the director, you can see how the cinema shortcuts for romantic friendship and tragic romance overlap. [Note: I’m still a little confused about romantic friendship and how it’s different than having a giant crush on your best friend, but that’s a whole other issue.]

So, to make a long story not so long, when I started getting dragged into the Stucky ship (probably mostly by that one gif from The Covenant of Sebastian Stan smirking while he was getting punched), I decided I was going to avoid the movies. Not out of some anti-consumerist impulse (my older daughter has a stupid number of superhero T-shirts), but because I don’t want to be disappointed.

And the Stucky fandom is so amazing. There’s this whole subgenre of fictional queer oral history, which I haven’t seen for other ships, and which I didn’t know I needed (and now I’m reading George Chauncey’s Gay New York). I feel like other fans have already extracted the best parts of the movie and fleshed them out. And I’ve created this kind of composite of what is probably canon and what is probably fanon, but if, for instance, Captain America didn’t actually protest the internment of Japanese Americans, I don’t want to know.