As perhaps you know, we host a QA forum on our web site, intended to answer questions about care, support and treatment for PLHIV in Indonesia. Since we get two or three questions a day, and sometimes as many as nine or ten, this keeps me quite busy.
We tell people that this forum is not intended to respond to 'Am I infected?' questions. However, since apparently there are no QA forums to answer this type of question, around 30% are like this. Usually I just delete them; although they do indeed need answers, I don't have the capability and knowledge (and - often - patience!) to answer them properly.
Again and again, people ask about the probability that they will be infected from one or another type of risky activity - almost always the first time they've ever done it, and also 'before God, the last time' (believe that if you will!). How they are going to interpret a probability of (say) 0,5% and determine what it means in their case, Lord alone knows.
Sometime the questions are even more curious - or downright biased. Take for example a question I got today:
"Have there been any studies to determine what percentage of HIV-positive women want to infect others? If there have been, please let me know the statistics."
Now, what sort of person would ask a question like that? How on earth would you do such a study. "Oh, by the way, Miss X, do you intend to infect other people?" Duuh!
But then, I'm not an epidemiologist, Perhaps this is the sort or question they do ask? Eli, are you listening?
Babé
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Well I like the fact that the question is at least gender specific!
Seriously, I don't know of such a question ever being asked in a survey. But I think the reason that YOU got asked the question is because of a common perception, which I've very often heard mentioned in Indonesia by people who are NOT involved with HIV. It goes like this: People who are infected want to pass on their infection deliberately, "karena takut meningal sendirian".
I don't know if this might be true in a handful of cases, because as you guessed we don't ask the question. But it seems to be contradicted by slogans devised by people with HIV such as "HIV stops with me!" And I've never heard of it with any other infectious disease (for which the same logic might also hold), so it would seem unlikely to be common.
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