] Carlos nonchalantly asks whether his drink was made with
] whole or skim milk. He takes a moment to slurp on his
] grande Caffe Mocha in a crowded Starbucks, and then he
] gets back to explaining how much he wants HIV, the virus
] that causes AIDS. His eyes light up as he says that the
] actual moment of transmission, the instant he gets HIV,
] will be "the most erotic thing I can imagine." He seems
] like a typical thirty-two-year-old man, but, in fact, he
] has a secret life. Carlos is chasing the bug.

Wow, this is really fucked up. I can't believe that someone would think that living with AIDS is anything like living with diabetes. This made my stomach turn.

[THis is definitly one of the most fucked up things I have read in a long time. These people are incredibly selfish and ignorant. First of all, having HIV isn't like having diabetes. When you get HIV, you are given a heavy cocktail of drugs that you have to take throughout the day. You have to adhere to a very specific schedule of taking these drugs, and its not just three times a day (at every meal)...its many more times then that...its a few different pills almost every hour of the day. Then, after a few years of doing that every day, eventually, the HIV starts to gain resistance, and you have to switch to a totally new cocktail of drugs. Side effects for these drugs arn't pretty either. Some people are lucky, and their immune systems stay ok. But most aren't so lucky...their immune systems eventually are compromised by the HIV because the virus hides out in places like your lymph nodes and fuck up immune cells. Then, if that person contracts even little diseases such as the flu, there is no immune system left to attack the new disease, and that person dies. These bug chasing people not only are providing the virus with an environment to grow and evolve into more resistant forms, making it impossible to eradicate this virus (if that is even possible at this point), but they are probably also contributing a major expense to the medical community. Its not cheap at all to develop new drugs when the drugs we have now become useless due to resistant strains of virus. It is just disturbing to me to think that there are people out there that would strive to contract a virus such as HIV. I studied HIV in Virology, and by far, its one of the scariest viruses I learned about. Its a very complex virus that knows how to hide out and use human genes and proteins to reproduce itself. These people are very stupid, and I guess they will figure that out sooner or later. Hopefully, sooner. -Nanochick]

RollingStone.com: News: Bug Chasers