Instant at-home HIV tests

[nice_cpl_n_bama]

When you consider how long it takes after infection till any test will show positive I think testing can lead to a false sense of security. Laurie and I always assume that every partner we choose could potentially have something nasty and just not know it yet. Because we make that assumption we always use condoms. We always say no to anything risky like anal.
Even if such tests were readily available the science says they aren't really all that trustworthy so why fiddle with them in the first place?

[fun4Ds]

we would probably be ok with the test, but maby we are a little diffrent.. we love going to clubs, but we always have a hotell suite while in the larger cities with a kitchenett, living room giant bed and a hot tub. a comfortable place for all.

now say we met at a club, we would want you to tell/ask us about the test (write off the bat.) we are there to party and meet compatible, new and old friends. yes our time with new play partners usally consist of quiet private talk, we like the chemistry that can build, but it would seem somehow rude to spend an hour flirting and then be hit with the test when we could have spent time with others (trusted /feel safe with) if your really into us and we are into you, maby we could submit to the test,(back at the hotell) and wait in the hot tub for the results.. you show us your results also, and we could go from there. maby even wait till next time we meet.,

this is your issue and you would have time to deal with this.

we are not impossible, usally quite open minded

[Lawguy]

Originally Posted by rpu3

I'm not sure where looks comes into it. If you are trying to play it safe, wouldn't you love to know any potential play partner always insisted on an HIV test for their prior encounters? Not just the good looking people?

I'm not on the 'testing at the club as a condition of play' bandwagon because of the fact that typical HIV tests specifically test for antibodies. Antibodies may not show as a positive test result for a period of time (anywhere from 2 weeks and up to 6 months), so that potential play partner might be at risk for infecting others, but you'd never know. Further, at this time (IIRC), the only FDA approved "at-home" kit only tests for HIV-1 antibodies, and not HIV-2. YMMV, of course.

So until an instant test is developed that actually tested for the presence of either virus, and not the antibodies, I personally am not going to be interested in asking people to test; instead I am more interested in minimizing the risk in a less invasive and potentially insulting manner.

Points well-taken. I guess a test of some kind is better than a test of no kind. BTW, the "gorgeous" thing was tongue-in-cheek.

[curiousagain]

I'm wondering, if you asked someone to submit to the HIV test and they said "sure, as soon as you fill out this 100 question psychological profile." What would your answer be?

[rpu3]

Originally Posted by Lawguy

Points well-taken. I guess a test of some kind is better than a test of no kind.

Okay, so you'd like a HIV test from your potential playmates. Got it. Out of curiosity, what about testing for the other potential STDs? After all, herpes is doesn't go away. Hepatitis can be fatal. HPV has been identified as a precursor to some forms of cervical cancer. Other infections can cause infertility, kidney damage, liver damage, etc.

Is the playmate test line only being drawn at HIV?

[sereneiders]

I've read a couple of posts comparing the subject of privacy to nuclear weapons (and just to add some spice here, I agree about the privacy rights in BOTH cases ), and talking about "common sense" to treat an epidemy as a goal jutifying any mean (wich would be, a lack of policies policy) because of "some people's political sacred cow" (and indeed, lack of policies is the law imposed by the strongest ones to preserve themselves from what scares them).

Again, we're discussing the basic rights of privacy value when facing a threat for the society as a whole. "Should any of us have the right to impose an HIV test to someone you suspect could be infected?" seems to me the same question than "Should the police have the right to break into your house should they suspect you're a terrorist or a criminal, without a court order?".

Wheter we like it or not, this is a political issue, should we move to Brad an Janet place to keep discussing this? Because I cannot play dumb prettending this isn't political, nor attempting an answer deprived from a political context. Better say, there extists an installed, hegemonic discussion frameset making certain political comments look like "common sense-non political" ones, and once you step outside the frameset to argue, what you say would be deemed as "political", out of topic and deserving to be banned. The fact is, everyting the human being does is "political", everithing we swingers discuss here is about "politics" (rules like "no means no" are policies), but no one dare to claim this for as long as we're "politically right". For certain discussions, you shouldn't opinate here since you'd be "politically wrong"... go to the corner, post at Brad and Janet's place... where no one of us will ever care to read your opinion.

Sorry guys, it wont be so easy to get rid of me this way.

Here the question is, where my rights ends to respect the next guy right?

- You have the right to ask people to bring you their HIV test.
- They have the right to bring it to you or to refuse (whithout entitling you to suppose anything about them).
- You have the right to play with whoever you want to, under your own terms. If the guy refuses, you have the right to not play with them.
- The guy have the right to avoid playing with you on the sole basis that you're asking him for a test.
- You do not have the right to disclose information about third ones tests, that they gave to you in confidence, to be consumed by you and only you.

Of course, this could be easily enforced only if both of you sign up an arrangement, wich the OP doesn't care to mention. Or if the one making the test is already commited by laws to keep whatever information about you as confidential, non disclosable one... as happens to your physician or a lab.

- You do not have the right to request information with the purpose of discriminating people from activities they're entitled to participate, because if you does, everyone else also could, and this would effectively out them from the society they have the right to be part of. For example, you cannot ask for an HIV test in order to decide wheter to employ a guy or not.

This seems to be an stretched example, we're talking of swinging, and not jobs. However, the society have to look for these stretched examples as to prevent them from happening. Once allowing anyone to test everyone for whatever private purpose, as swinging is, it would be hard to control wheter the private purpose were the undesirable ones.

Let's suppose the scenario where you ask some guy to make the test inside the club. Should the guy refuse to do it, he'd be outed. Should the guy agree, he doesn't have any choice but to make the results public. For example, if today you ask a guy for the HIV test, the guy could take it and should the result were positive, he still have the chance to claim he didn't took the test and he would not do it, so you wouldn't know for sure about him, leaving the result to the sphere of his privacy, wich is his right.

Now, we may agree or disagree with the current standards about our rights. We may allow our fears to lead us to relinkish our individual, basic rights, and build up the illusion of safety. History proven this illusion have a short life, that once we relinkish our personal rights for a "bigger cause", that cause ends up bitting our tail and we suffer the consecuences once prevented by those rigths we had.

For those who may argue "what this third wourld's guy knows about a well organized society knows, as to suppose this could happen to us?" I only have to say that, preciselly because I am from the third world (once in the first, often deluded we were in the first), I know for sure every step in this road, about the fears leading us to relinkish our rights in the name of a big cause supposedly able to get rid of those fears, and how it evolves into a nightmare you cannot run away from... just becayse you already relinkished the very same rights.

Is this guy talking of swinging or what? Yes, I am talking of swinging, but also about the rest of our lives. Because living isn't just to ensure the blood to keep running and be able to last longer and hear our grandsons congratulate us for our 96 birthday, this must be done with dignity, and up to me, at the price of ensuring we do our best to provide the next guy the same dignity we want for ourselves. Being blunt... would you kill a guy because you need his kidney to survive? If not killing him, would you deem him to live attached to blood a filtering machine as for you to have his kidney, avoiding your attachment to the same machine? This blunt example show my point about the dignity. Would you put all the HIV positive guys in a getto to minimize your risk to be infected? Because this could be a "common sense" way to deal with an epidemy, a perpetual quarentine, but... should you ever get infected, would you like to be thrown in the getto?

If we have the right to make HIV tests at will, in public, without respect for the tested guy right to keep the result private, then it would be the same, and way less expensive (as to save medical resources for a best purpose) to tatoo a warning sing on the guy's forehead for the rest of us to know he's positive. How far we'd be from the getto?

[Lawguy]

See below

[Lawguy]

Originally Posted by rpu3

Okay, so you'd like a HIV test from your potential playmates. Got it. Out of curiosity, what about testing for the other potential STDs? After all, herpes is doesn't go away. Hepatitis can be fatal. HPV has been identified as a precursor to some forms of cervical cancer. Other infections can cause infertility, kidney damage, liver damage, etc.

Is the playmate test line only being drawn at HIV?

First a response to curiousagain. Umm, will flunking a 100 question psychological profile kill you? Probably not. Will flunking an HIV test kill you; probably could. Can't see the difference? Hmm. I'll move on.

rpu3: "Okay, so you'd like a HIV test from your potential playmates. Got it." Am I being overly sensitive, or was that dripping with sarcasm? I mean, I have not ranted about AT ALL about the tests (only responded to other's comments) and so your sarcastic remark is simply uncalled for. As for your other question: yeah, I think a 10-minute hepatitis might be a good test too (although it's much more treatable than HIV where there is a 40% resistence to current drugs). Herpes, HPV, etc., are all less serious than HIV (either they are treatable or not known to be deadly), but yeah, if there's a 10 minute test for these, then why the heck not? rpu3, are you actually suggesting that you don't want to know if your partner has hepatitis? I mean, you certainly imply that you wouldn't want to test them, so I guess if you are about to play with a couple that has Hep C or something, then I guess from what you are saying that they have the green light to remain silent. Wow, again the logic simply escapes me.

In short, while some folks here are open to my muses--I am amazed at how many people here are defensive when it comes to an inexpensive, easy, and quick way to reduce (notice I didn't say eliminate) the chances of being killed by casual sex? Makes all of the pontificating about condoms appear specious. If one is truly interested in safe sex, then the only thing that could be better than a condom (which, given a choice, most would eschew anyways), is to know that your partner is not infected with an STD. How am I wrong here? I'm begging to know, how am I unreasonable?

[rpu3]

Originally Posted by Lawguy

rpu3: "Okay, so you'd like a HIV test from your potential playmates. Got it." Am I being overly sensitive, or was that dripping with sarcasm? I mean, I have not ranted about AT ALL about the tests (only responded to other's comments) and so your sarcastic remark is simply uncalled for.

Actually, that wasn't sarcastic at all. I would have put the sarcasm icon there if I felt the need to be sarcastic. Thus, since it wasn't sarcasm but merely my style of speaking in real life and in my internet life, I don't believe it was uncalled for by any means.

Originally Posted by Lawguy

As for your other question: yeah, I think a 10-minute hepatitis might be a good test too (although it's much more treatable than HIV where there is a 40% resistence to current drugs). Herpes, HPV, etc., are all less serious than HIV (either they are treatable or not known to be deadly), but yeah, if there's a 10 minute test for these, then why the heck not? rpu3, are you actually suggesting that you don't want to know if your partner has hepatitis? I mean, you certainly imply that you wouldn't want to test them, so I guess if you are about to play with a couple that has Hep C or something, then I guess from what you are saying that they have the green light to remain silent. Wow, again the logic simply escapes me.

I simply asked you directly as to testing for the other diseases, given the potential for great physical harm. I didn't suggest anything nor did I put out my personal reasoning or logic or a defensive stance, other than I was curious as to your answer. Thank you for your answer to my question. And to be clear, that isn't sarcasm either.

[Lawguy]

Originally Posted by rpu3

Actually, that wasn't sarcastic at all. I would have put the sarcasm icon there if I felt the need to be sarcastic. Thus, since it wasn't sarcasm but merely my style of speaking in real life and in my internet life, I don't believe it was uncalled for by any means.



I simply asked you directly as to testing for the other diseases, given the potential for great physical harm. I didn't suggest anything nor did I put out my personal reasoning or logic or a defensive stance, other than I was curious as to your answer. Thank you for your answer to my question. And to be clear, that isn't sarcasm either.

Well I definitely apologize for misreading you rpu3. Forgive me for my oversensitivity.

Lawguy

[spectraschain]

being killed by casual sex?

But what a way to go....

As opposed, to say, being dragged into a wood chipper...

[spectraschain]

I'm impressed...my juvenile "firm grasp of the obvious" test would appear to be a success...

[VegasLee]

If one is truly interested in safe sex, then the only thing that could be better than a condom (which, given a choice, most would eschew anyways), is to know that your partner is not infected with an STD.

If one is truly interested in Safe sex then they would have their own partner tested for everything that one could possibly catch and if they are negative on all tests then only have sex with that partner.

That would be the ONLY safe way to be sure you will not catch anything.

[sereneiders]

Originally Posted by VegasLee

If one is truly interested in Safe sex then they would have their own partner tested for everything that one could possibly catch and if they are negative on all tests then only have sex with that partner.

That would be the ONLY safe way to be sure you will not catch anything.

Not even that. If one is truelly interested in Safe Sex then you'd have to be tested yourself for everithing that you could possibly catch, and once proven you're negative for them all, and ALWAYS wearing a bullet proof condom... you can masterbate at will.

[good times]

When I posted my previous post regarding my suspicions that very few people, if any, would be willing to take this test it was not without any previous experience in the matter. Several years ago, at one of our local on-premise clubs, their was a couple who were regulars who started a campaign to get all of the other regulars to start a club list of those who had agreed to be tested for STD's and checked out ok. They approached about 20-30 couples with the idea and had no takers and it was obvious that most thought they were nuts for even suggesting such a thing. The common consensus was that such a list would be a total waste of time and be counter productive in the end, it would automatically make a clique of those club regulars on the list, and it would be useless as soon as the first person on the list played with someone who wasn't on the list.

Besides the problem of false positives, I can think of many other reasons why a rational person would refuse to take this test. Some examples include, the already mentioned incubation period making the test useless for active swingers who have multiple partners in short periods of time, the fact that swingers are in such a low risk group for AIDS, especially those of us who only play with other couples, as to make the test a total waste of time, and the fact that, at least for me, anyone that paranoid about it wouldn't be attractive to me as a play partner in the first place.

And while the "false positive" problem might be a low percentage, and on the surface might seem to be a minor problem easily overcome with further testing, if it did happen, I can guarantee that everyone in the club and probably the total local swinging community would know about it in short order. While people may say that they would keep the results confidential, from experience I can say that they would honor your confidentiality agreement only as long as the test produced good news, if it showed you as positive for an STD, they would tell everyone they know if for no other reason than to make sure they weren't playing with someone who had played with you. Once you have done further testing and were found to be free of the disease though, it would now be good news which everyone would be totally happy to keep confidential unless it came up in a conversation on its own. In other words people are generally much less compelled to spread the good news than they are to share bad news, that is just human nature. And even though some would argue otherwise, in our experience, swingers are just as human and bend to natures urges regarding spreading news about others just as much as non-swinging humans do.