Greentext

8chan still exists?

"why savor a fine bordeux when the local liquor store has horse tranquilizer in plastic jugs" mfer

I'm not. The site was running on old software a decade ago and hasn't been touched. I'd be surprised if they don't swipe another chan software and just slapped a coat of paint on it, but I don't expect them to be rushing to get the site back online after they got entirely rinsed.

There's two variants. One is extremely harmless and is generally oral. This is the one that nearly everyone has and no one really notices. The other variant is generally genital (though either one can be in either place) and is more severe and less common. The first outbreak can be really bad, subsequent ones less so. An estimated 1 in 10 adults in the US have it, though I'd imagine it skews a lot more towards highly sexually active communities. It can be transmitted even if you don't actively have sores, though that's much rather. Condoms also don't prevent transmission, though again they make it much more unlikely. While getting it certainly doesn't have to be the end of the world it is worse than they generally say.

Here's the really fun part of the above stat: the majority of those cases are spread via family members kissing.

i’m sorry that you’ve had that experience and i don’t mean to diminish what you’re don’t through, but it’s also very important to note that this is far from the normal for the very large majority of people

fear doesn’t help sexual health… all sex comes with risks, and unprotected sex comes with significantly increased risk but the reality is by and large this is not what HSV looks like without other factors effecting it

downplaying risks is bad, but equally bad is people thinking a condition is worse than it is. this leads to more risky behaviour, because if they get the “scary” thing and it’s not as bad as they expect, they can take risky behaviour because they discount all their other education

it also only reinforces stigmas. this is particularly common with HIV-positive people: these days, if you have an undetectable viral load (if you take your daily medications) you can not pass on HIV… however the stigma remains, and people still often choose to not have sex with someone with an undetectable HIV infection (again, undetectable IS UNTRANSMITTABLE)

muddying the waters is very bad at scale

calm, unbiased information is what is required for public health. individual anecdotes about worst case scenarios do not serve to make people’s lives better

Thats false! “Transmission may still occur when symptoms are not present.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herpes

And it's asymptomatic most of the time. 😚