> "Vampire facial" is the common name for a platelet-rich plasma microneedling procedure. In this treatment, a patient's blood is drawn, spun down to separate out plasma from blood cells, and the platelet-rich plasma is then injected into the face with microneedles. It's claimed—with little evidence—that it can rejuvenate and improve the look of skin, and got notable promotions from celebrities, including Gwyneth Paltrow and Kim Kardashian.
> In an inspection in the fall of 2018, health investigators found shocking conditions: unwrapped syringes in drawers and counters, unlabeled tubes of blood sitting out on a kitchen counter, more unlabeled blood and medical injectables alongside food in a kitchen fridge, and disposable equipment—electric desiccator tips—that were reused. The facility also did not have an autoclave—a pressurized oven—for sterilizing equipment.
There are a bunch of weird things in the article. HIV typically has three phases: acute for first 6 months (most contagious, perhaps cold symptoms), chronic for up 11 years if untreated, or much longer if under treatment, and then AIDS.
Per the report two cases were acute and one case (two?) had AIDS, yet they all fell within the same viral DNA cluster (AIDS if infected in 2018 would be rare). So it seems that they were infected at very different times, yet they share a common viral strand. One explanation was that the clinic was using infected blood rather than customers' own blood, but even that sounds weird.
That's incorrect. 8-10 years is generally reported as the "average" time from infection to AIDS, but faster progressions are by no means rare. One study found that up to 13% of newly infected patients may develop AIDS within one year. Developing AIDS 6 years out from infection is certainly unfortunate but by no means rare.
Just a meta-observation on the discourse here. I'm _shocked_ that the discourse on ArsTechnica for this story seems civilized while here on HN it's all (so far) snark.
There are definitely snarky comments, but at least looking at it now all the shitty comments are flagged or downvoted at the bottom, while the more useful and insightful ones are at the top.
Not sure if this is part of what you’re observing, but on ArsTechnica, ther article is presented by default, and you have to click to get to the comments.
On HN, the comments are presented by default, and you have to click to get to the article.
To be charitable towards HN, one potential angle of discussion is the privacy implications of using genetic sequencing for investigations. A less charitable towards HN angle would be to talk about how to do this business better and blitzscale it effectively. Of course, ultimately one would expect HN posters to behave with civility and empathy.
I mean, there's plenty of snark on both sites' comment sections. You are allowed to feel sympathy for the victims while also wondering WTF they were thinking. Both are possible.
HN's audience is often pretty petty and biting towards out groups, and tends towards a certain political axis ime (often a sort of progressive individualism) that can be pretty snarky towards people who, in their eyes, "should have known better".
Really? HN has been a mini-Reddit for quite some time now. Frequently just a bunch of low quality, unfunny and recycled one-liners hoping to grab a few precious internet points.
I don’t agree with that at all. While I do think HN discussion has become generally more negative I still almost always find interesting or useful stuff in comments. I think they’re a valuable way to check the pulse of the tech community.
It excels in only one area: scaling. You can "scale down to zero" (to the point where if there is no usage, you theoretically are not paying for stand-by hardware). You also do not have to -- theoretically -- worry about scaling rules and about provisioning more hardware when your service needs more workers to handle demand.
However, everywhere else it is a shit-show. Not being able to do anything resembling local testing & debugging requires you either: keep the architecture very simple (why use serverless in that case?), try and spin up one of the numerous half-baked virtualization solutions, or spend more time writing, testing, and maintaining scaffolding/mocking/whatever to interface between all your "add-ons" (e.g. SQS, S3, etc.). Your only way to track message flow is with extensive and expressive logging.
Deployment is a pain. What should be a sub 30second operation is routinely 5mins for even the smallest packages (AWS deployment tools are stupid inefficient) -- annoyingly breaking any sort of flow every time you have to deploy to test things you cannot test locally. Now imagine that being your working loop every day -- utter madness if you want to keep any sort of velocity or morale.
The ecosystem is not mature. I still have packaging utilities (built and maintained by a mag7) that fail silently causing production outages. The other tooling is also half-baked and a pain in the ass to use (much less learn the edge cases around). Serverless (the framework) is a shitty replacement for Terraform. The lack of a language server to understand whether or not my YAML IaC will actually do what I want it to do without dry-running is tedious.
Containers are wasteful, half-baked, and unperformant.
My workloads have always been either CPU or I/O heavy. No I do not need 2GB of RAM and a single (unknown spec) vCPU. I need at most a 100MB of RAM for my JVM/CLR and a fast-enough CPU. But the only way to provision a faster/less gimped CPU is to "bump the tier" of the lambda by provisioning more memory. Ergo you pay for memory you do not use nor need, simply so your lambda doesn't time out in its maximum 15min container lifespan, on heavy workloads.
The file handle limits are also something asinine, like 128 open handles per lambda with no way to modify. So I cannot open more than ~128 network sockets when I need to fan out compute to get past kneecapped container resources.
Cold-starts: it's been beaten to death. But if you're running a language with a bytecode interpreter your options are to either provision concurrency (i.e. force a container to always be warm/spun-up, and incurring all those costs, which would have been unarguably cheaper with a server, even an EC2) or modify your source and ahead-of-time compile everything you can. Otherwise, you will not get sub 300ms cold invocations (a sever in the most optimal location would get you sub 10ms latencies).
If you have long-running workloads or are trying to squeeze the most performance out of your backend: serverless is not going to cut it. This is ignoring all the inter-infrastructure communication that add even more latency.
N.B. this is for moderately complex web apps built on AWS, it may not be wholly representative of the landscape.
And apologies for the harsh language, but the entire "serverless" hype has given me plenty of scar tissue -- especially in a "move fast, now!" startup landscape.
Thanks for the reply. It was a good read. And I can agree on the points from experience.
One suggestion/correction: "Your only way to track message flow is with extensive and expressive logging.", you can do distributed tracing. It not a silver bullet, nor does it replace a proper debugger, but it's better than following logs. You can use a number of distributed tracing SaaS's, but you still have to do at least some manual instrumentation in your code to add additional info.
You can't regulate stupidity and also I am against my stupidity being regulated. I might want to jump out of a perfectly good moving plane midflight to experience the thrill of what people then have to do to possibly survive, let me. Otherwise I will do it anyway without benefit of being able to research different legal providers of this thrill.
One could argue for "explain what risks are and which precautions we are and aren't taking" government regulation and in fact I had to sign a slip of paper saying that jumping out of plane might be dangerous. But do you really expect idiots to listen?
Two horny people might also have sex and pass HIV to each other. Unlike conservatives (marriage license) or liberals (MeToo consent form), libertarians like myself do not want to force them to sign a piece of paper first, though I think they should exercise due diligence. As a practical matter, I don't actually care if you have to sign a piece of paper before getting a vampire facial, it will not ruin the mood to the same degree. But how much difference would it actually make given all the numerous ways one can hurt themselves doing stupid things? If you try to regulate all of them, that would really be a totalitarian nightmare where government is constantly watching you and stopping you from living your life as you want.
It sounds like it might've helped prevent even more infections. Stopping a bad practices doesn't change the past, but it can help influence the future.
I've had this done. They draw your own blood and run it through a centrifuge to extract the plasma. there is NO reason the people getting this should have had to worry if not for the complete and other negligence and callousness of th clinic.
Do you think the staff making minimum wage (or less) at a salon are qualified to do that? Is this a regulated industry with certification for these treatments? Genuinely asking because I barely feel comfortable having my blood drawn at an actual medical lab by a random worker.
Well, it's supposed to be injecting bits of your own body. But when the place doesn't even own an autoclave and reuses disposable equipment, I suppose you get what you pay for.
I hate the term manageable because it implies a lot of stuff that people take for granted.
I have a manageable disease (not HIV), and one of my biggest (albeit fantasy) gripes is that for better or worse I cannot choose to opt out of society.
I can't live on a desert island. I'll die if i'm ever a castaway regardless of how well packed the island is with coconut trees.
More realistically it means that I can't be away from 'shipping range' for any more than a week or two before supplies dwindle and I meander back to society, having hit the extents of my leash.
This sucks as a sailor. It's actually not manageable with the hobby of sailing long distances, forcing all sorts of compromises that turn the hobby into something different.
So, when someone describes something as manageable, well, it's generic and leaves out so much context as to be worthwhile for only a small feel-good sound-bite. Maybe that person finds it manageable; it's not advice to be applied globally.
If you have access to HIV drugs, it's pretty manageable. You will always be immunocompromised however, your mucosal T-cells will never be the same, but in the great picture, life expectancy with medicated HIV is as good as life expectancy without HIV. Having to take daily pills until you die is still a pretty nasty thing however :), there is no cure.
I would definitely group HIV with the "nastier stuff".
Even in larger cities it is quite rare to see patients with full-blown AIDS - and the few times that happens, it comes down to:
- Severe drug addiction and (often combined with) mental illness that results in the patient not being able to follow the drug regiment. This is the main reason.
- Religious reasons, homeopathy, etc. The patient believes they can prey the illness away, use alternative medicine, or similar.
- Extreme denial. The patient simply doesn't believe they have HIV, and thus refuse to take medication.
Most places in the western world HIV medication is free, for obvious reasons.
Notice how it's never men doing stupidly risky stuff to try to look young and beautiful.
The societal pressure on women to look young and beautiful is ridiculous. And influential women actively promoting such garbage is part of the problem.
Men get former Mr. Universe's modeling "eat right and exercise." (Arnold in case you aren't getting the reference.) Women get this kind of crap.
> Notice how it's never men doing stupidly risky stuff to try to look young and beautiful.
Steroid use is increasingly common among "hobby bodybuilders", a predominantly male demographic, which has all sorts of nasty side effects. Now there are apparently also procedures where young men break their bones to gain a few centimeters in height.
While cosmetic procedures aren't as common among men as they are in women, they're getting increasingly popular. So saying its "never" men is a huuuuuuuugeeee stretch.
They also prescribe steroids to boost your immune system when you have nasty infections, so it's not cut and dried that "steroids = all downside and stupidity."
Unless you want to insist modern medicine has deep flaws and needs a major overhaul. Good luck getting taken seriously with such opinions.
"Steroids" [0] are a very broad category of organic compounds, and it is a mistake to assume that the effects of steroids used for performance enhancing and bodybuilding —anabolic steroids, themselves still a broad category [1]— have anything to do with steroids in general and the specific clinical use cases that each of them may have.
Furthermore, the steroids that you are referring to are most likely corticosteroids [2], which are most certainly not prescribed to "boost your immune system" but rather to reduce the immune response when it is excessive, or even suppress it to treat autoimmune diseases.
Please don't assume that off-label anabolic steroid usage is somehow safe and healthy only because modern medicine uses completely different compounds which happen to share a portion of their chemical structure for treating specific medical issues.
You asserted that 'it's never men doing stupidly risky stuff to try to look young and beautiful', to which a commenter replied that 'steroid use is increasingly common among "hobby bodybuilders", a predominantly male demographic'.
Don't you think that is an example of men doing 'stupidly risky stuff' for cosmetic reasons?
To my mind, it's a little different because bodybuilding is a form of fitness when done right.
Injecting blood into the skin on your face is purely cosmetic.
And I have a lot of experience with doing things that helped my health in the face of not having a proper diagnosis for nearly 36 years that other people were highly critical of, so I'm a tad skeptical that young men using steroids are all 100 percent merely being stupid and self destructive.
No doubt that some are. But I feel it's more complicated than the kinds of cosmetic crap women tend to do.
I was of the impression that when talking about stupid things people do to themselves, it did not specifically need to be said that I am talking about anabolic steroid abuse without a prescription, for the purpose of performance enhancement.
I'm absolutely not trying to strawman your comment.
There is no clear cut, bright line between life and health. The body doesn't care if you took steroids with a prescription or without one.
As noted in another comment, Arnold Schwarzenegger has a heart condition. I have read it might have killed him at a young age if he hadn't been a devoted fitness nut.
> The body doesn't care if you took steroids with a prescription or without one.
The body doesn't, but the person who prescribes the medication does. With any medication there are tradeoffs to be made. A doctor is usually able to make a more qualified assessment of said tradeoffs than the average patient.
After all, the tradeoffs of taking anabolic steroids are plenty, especially when taken over longer periods of time.
And not to mention the fact that the stuff people source illegaly is rarely chemically as safe as the stuff used as medication.
> He's still alive.
He is, many other high profile bodybuilders aren't. While that's not a medically meaningful statistic, these are the people whose aesthetics young men strive for.
I'm someone with a serious medical condition where the official medical position boils down to "Quit your bitching about how you want real help and stop bothering us with ridiculous demands to do something effective. Politely and quietly die your slow, torturous death while revering and appreciating the monsters not really caring about your welfare."
So my view of modern medicine is a tad more jaded than yours and I guess this is where we agree to disagree.
He also apparently has a heart condition that might have killed him had he not been a fitness nut. Instead, he had heart surgery and called someone in Hollywood from his hospital bed to be emotionally supportive when their movie was doing poorly which just made the guy go something like "Oh. He's hospitalized and calling me to cheer me up. It's worse than I feared!"
The existence of folks like Andrew Tate suggests otherwise. Aren't there dudes doing like infrared blasting off their balls or getting penile implants?
Both toxic masculinity and toxic femininity exist.
Toxic femininity seems more mainstream than toxic masculinity and, in fact, this is the first time I've heard anyone use that expression. Most people think this cult of youth and beauty is fine and critics like me are weirdos.
It’s not societal pressure women do it do themselves. If a woman looks hot people will try please them for no reason and once they start losing that they cant handle being in a social status of nobody cares/irrelevant
Edit: hmm maybe that is societal pressure in a way
I agree with you that women do this to themselves and famous influential women actively promote it, not men. That doesn't mean there's no social pressure.
Jelqing runs a high risk of destroying your penile tissue. Feel free to Google it, but expect stories like "I quit when I started ejaculating blood."
PRP injections are a relatively safe procedure, and should not give you HIV. The risk of HIV comes from using unsafe medical practices like sharing needles, and this exact same risk exists when injecting other substances like Synthol.
> Side effects of PRP injections are very limited because the injections are created from your own blood, and your body should not reject them or react in any negative way. As with any injection, there is a remote risk of infection. Otherwise, there are no significant risks apart from the variability and unpredictability of how effective the treatment will be for a particular patient.
I'm the fool who made the original critique. The outcomes being disproportionate looks pertinent to me.
Stupidity is everywhere. Saying some things are moderately stupid in x thing, so face-palming about egregious stupidity in y thing is an overreaction is essentially dismissive of valid concerns.
Women get surgery to get bigger boobs, primarily as a looks thing.
Are we at the stage of inserting silicone in your junk so your jock strap looks better?
(Please note you can just pad your bra if you want to look busty fully clothed. And it leaves scars, so I'm skeptical of the value it has for looking good naked or in teeny, tiny bikinis.)
Appologies, I glossed over the word "into" from your comment. Packers are not implanted. Penile implants exist but are typically done for medical reasons (like you've fucked up your junk by jelqing). The closest thing to female breast implants is male pec implants. I'd argue Synthol is similar too, though less invasive.
My general understanding is that phallus enlargement is intended to enhance sexual pleasure whereas breast enlargement has no such function and from what I gather likely reduces sexual pleasure for the woman.
But I don't have a phallus, haven't seen one in ages and I'm perfectly happy to be educated on the topic by actual penis-having peoples more in the know than little ole me.
I know one of the major risks of enlargement is impotence, and like with breast enlargement I can't imagine jamming a bunch of non-nerve things in there improving sexual pleasure.
I'm no expert on the subject, but I've always thought people primarily got them to look better with maybe some hope of performing better for their partner. I've never thought they were for their pleasure, except in the same way as breast enlargement where you enjoy pleasing your partner.
Still, I think a better comparison is "men get hair treatments, primarily as a looks thing."
This is not stupidly risky stuff. It was the unlicensed clinic at fault.
There is nothing wrong about wanting to look good. There is nothing wrong with working to achieve something. There is also nothing wrong with doing risky things.
I feel like solving the worlds issues isn't needed when talking about vampire facials. It's been used medically as well. It's an interesting tech.
It's more interesting to try and understand does it actually work.
I'm a woman on an overwhelmingly male forum giving my take. As a demographic outlier for this forum, my take tends to not be what most people here would say.
Sometimes, people find that insightful, thought provoking and valuable.
Sometimes it looks like this.
I have zero ability to predict beforehand which it will be.
