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Comment by anovikov | Hacker News Reader

Ignorance of STDs was okay in 1960s, because antibiotics worked really great back then and just about every STD was easily curable.

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This is being downvoted to oblivion but I'm not sure if it's true or not; hopefully someone can weigh in before it disappears.

Well hepatitis C wasn't and isn't easily curable, but i guess awareness of it was pretty low.

Is a stronger statement that hepatitis C is NOT curable, as it's a retroviral infection, thereby rewriting host DNA? [ Edit: i'd remembered incorrectly from decades ago: it's an RNA virus ]

To be clear, hepatitis C now has a 95+% cure rate with modern treatments.

>hepatitis C is NOT curable, as it's a retroviral infection

Hepatitis C isn't a retrovirus, so I don't understand what you're saying.

There's a cure for Hepatitis C since 2015.

Importantly, while the bacterial STIs were curable, Herpes was definitely not.

Herpes wasn't considered a disease at the time. It was not pathologized until later.

This is more or less true. The pharmacy company Burroughs Wellcome is largely blamed for pathologizing "genital herpes" starting in the late 70s.

https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/ypa8nb/did-big-pharma...

Wait a second. With heroes you get painful, oozing sores on your genitals. It sometimes never goes away and can flare up at any time.

Does it really take a company to make people think of it as a disease?

"Oh my penis feels like it's on fire and oozing all over me. However, I wouldn't call it a disease."

AIUI it wasn’t considered a disease similar to how cold sores aren’t.

And HPV wasn't linked with cervical cancer yet - that doesn't mean it wasn't a disease. And I'm comfortable calling HSV-2 a disease based on the potential congenital consequences alone.

It's certainly a manageable one, and the stigma around it is silly, but if the common cold is a disease, then herpes is.

Doesn't seem likely. Do you have data on this?

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