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I forgot to mention my experience was in the northeastern USA in the 2000s-2010s. I’m happy you got a better standard of care than I did!

In Europe I don't think it's commonly done. For example, the standard Dutch MSM STI test [1] covers HIV, Syphilis, Chlamydia, and Gonorrhoea only while Trichomoniasis, HPV 2 and Herpes are rather common. That being said, it's freely available at most hospitals.

[1] https://www.mantotman.nl/

Note that doesn't include HSV (especially 2) which can be transmitted asymptomatically, and even with a condom. The medical establishment doesn't consider it a concern, but it's worth having both parties check.

I've never had a piss or blood test.

Hep C isn't commonly sexually transmitted so it's odd they would test for it. It's more of a concern in certain occupations, like healthcare, where you may come into contact with blood.

hep c antibody basically if positive they will probably do hep c viral load

https://www.labcorp.com/tests/144050/hepatitis-c-virus-hcv-a...

A standard STi clinic should have you covered. They should do the full pipecleaner wee and blood check

Just latent, never suspected a thing.

So it is less "England has a program and the others don't" and more that each NHS is pursuing the same WHO goal independently, with different reporting and timelines

Yeah... but there aren't any borders really.

Yes, that's what I said - each is named "NHS [country]" (National Health Service [England | Scotland | etc]).

Well, then, we can offer you measles, instead. How's that? We're also working on bringing back polio and smallpox. Think of it as our contribution to FREEDOM!

And that same problem leading to him is the same reason why we have 3rd world diseases coming back...

Farage isn't quite the same and of course the situation is rather different.

The three jobs are divided up differently, though still between too few people. You have a Figurehead, the Head of State, which here is King Charles and in the US is Donald Trump. That's the part Trump most likes, you get free gold stuff, you're allowed to do whatever you please, everybody is supposed to suck up to you, hooray. Farage would not get that job.

Next you've got Executive leader. Trump doesn't enjoy this as much. People keep trying to blame him for the fact he's bad at it. He appointed people he saw on TV to run things, how is it his fault they're not brilliant? This would be half of Farage's job as Prime Minister and he likes being asked to account for his incompetence even less than Trump.

Finally Head of the Legislature, in the US this isn't Trump's job, Mike Johnson is in the House and John Thune in the Senate. Farage would get this job in full as the Prime Minister. Even before he resigned he was rarely actually in Westminster, it's boring and you need to be good at actual politics, so of course he's not there, he gets paid more to be somewhere else.

I also don't think Nigel can put together the numbers. Trump has Mike and John to try to make the numbers work, and Farage wouldn't have that. "My way or the highway" is what Farage would say, and that doesn't make the numbers work. That's how you lose a Confidence motion and you're back on your arse in six weeks.

[Edited to correct the Senate leader, mistake pointed out by ragnese below]

I'm quite sure you can cure then with Paracetamol /s

You don’t have to ask theoretical questions. Write one yourself and post it in the comments, see how it goes! I’m rooting for you!

Given the amount of cultural influence the USA has and the universal nature of the internet it seems likely to me that global anti-vax sentiment could have started with the USA.

Looking at global population stats, you can clearly see where germ theory and vaccines entered human civilization.

All this "natural something" and antivax movement certainly is the other direction. Maybe it's subconscious population control, maybe informational warfare... maybe people just got a little detached from reality by not dying all the time, as you suggested.

Anti-vaxxing goes back literally centuries, but the internet definitely made it a THING.

I am very prepared to get downvoted for bringing this up - but I'm not convinced that the "anti-vax movement" most people think of is truly to blame (that is, crazy people who think it gives you autism or whatever).

At least in my area, there are pockets of (relatively) new immigrants that have MMR vaccination rates at around 30% (that's very low, much lower than the anti-vaxxer population could account for imo), and the reasons for that have nothing to do with MAGA/MAHA as far as I can tell.

It's an entirely different problem (that needs solving), and pretending that this is simply the by-product of uneducated crazies on the internet feels like it's over indexing on a loud and flashy but ultimately small part of the problem.

They are not the progenitors of the skepticism, but they gave the skeptics significantly more authority than they previously had. Over surveillance networks, vaccine scheduling, public health comms, etc. MAGA sees them as useful idiots for the coalition, rather than threats to the US.

Here [1] is a montage of some of the public messaging around the COVID vaccines. [1] It was quite simply dishonest. That, paired alongside the effort to force people to take the shots, completely destroyed public trust on a level that will take many decades to repair. Generalized vaccine skepticism follows naturally from that.

I'm certainly a part of that group. For instance I ended up doing extensive research on e.g. MMR before deciding to vaccinate my kids for it. If this were a decade ago, I almost certainly would have done it without a second thought, just as I took all recommended vaccines before traveling without a second thought. So I'm obviously not anti-vaccine in the least, but I no longer trust public messaging on the topic.

It was just another (of the increasingly endless) examples of governments/companies pursuing short-term interests while ignoring long-term consequences. When it comes to what people put in their bodies, trust is more important than literally anything else.

[1] - https://xcancel.com/ITGuy1959/status/1581034815700488192

You don't think RFK has anything to do with it?

You think the Trump influence magically stops at the border? There are _plenty_ of Canadians who think Trump has all the answers and can't be wrong.

He knows he can't push his base too hard on certain things. He probably knows this about vaccines, he lauds Operation Warp Speed but as a win of his not a vaccine that could have saved millions more with his cooperation. He chooses his power over what's best for all of us. He's the leader of the antivax train by choice.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/10/trump-vaccin...

"The order recommends that all shots be given at separate medical visits, a frequent point Trump has made despite the safety, ease and lower costs of giving vaccines together."

'“Together, there could be a possibility they’re quite lethal,” Trump said of the MMR vaccine at the signing of the order on Monday.'

'Asked if he had evidence that the combined MMR vaccine was “lethal”, Trump said: “No. What I’ve heard is that there are some people who say it is that way.”'

Antivax fundamentally has its contemporary roots in Andrew Wakefield's fraudulent anti-MMR campaign.

So directing by executive order and by his own admission without evidence that the MMR vaccine be split up into separate shots is, very clearly, an antivax action. This is the first victory that Wakefield (a man who had a patent on a single measles vaccine!) wanted, and RFK Jr was pursuing.

But this is Trump saying this and signing it. So as of yesterday, it now has everything to do with Trump, sorry. He has handed the anti-MMR movement its ultimate victory and in so doing validated the entire antivax worldview.

"Evidence" requires citations.

You are willfully deluding yourself if you believe that. He put an anti-vax idiot as head of HHS. How is that "nothing"?

It has a lot to do with him. He doesn't actually have an opinion on any policy issue. For various political reasons, Trump decided to let RFK dictate public health policy according to his extremely delusional ideas. Yes, there was an antivax movement in this country for many years, just as there has been misogyny, racism, and transphobia. Trump has normalized and supercharged all of these moronic and dangerous ideas.

I have not been following measles in Canada, so I can't address that.

Trump is trying to hang Fauci. That goes in the completely opposite direction of promoting the trust of medical institutions in general society, and it's trust that will get people back to vaccinating themselves and their children.

He is amplifying the issue, but you're right, Trump is a symptom of the underlying problem. The problem is that internet gave these idiots a platform to mislead people.

Back in the early 90s this wasn't much of a problem. Childhood vaccine requirements weren't some hot-button topic then. Most people would just get them when faced with the requirement. Most opposition was isolated to people who were otherwise contrarians already.

The difference now is that the internet is full of these isolated contrarians who are now influencing gullible people who don't know who to trust.

Putting an anti-vax conspiracy theorist in charge of health is not the way to do it.

"has nothing to do with it" is not the same as "is not the cause of". Trump and antivax definitely are related as both are symptoms of the same public strategy that spreads misinformation, polarizes discourse and weaponizes stupidity.

>> Canada is doing even worse then us when it comes to measles

Not in Canada but unfortunately US nonsense spreads globally pretty quickly these days. The amount of Trump support in the UK is both bizarre and surprising. When someone with the worlds largest megaphone lies about vaccines, unfortunately people everywhere listen.

Right, because tapping one of the world's biggest vaccine truthers to run the Department of HHS and then proceed to link autism with vaccines and change the recommended MMR vaccine scheduling for children has absolutely no impact on anyone.

I can't help but feel this is ragebait or a bot.

He was literally spreading FUD about vaccines today. And the measles stuff has got so bad RFK had to mildy backtrack on his previous antivax statements in recent interviews.

From today:

Both Trump and Kennedy made repeated mentions of autism throughout the order signing, emphasizing a scientifically unproven link between vaccines and the condition. Dozens of studies show no link between the two.

“Today we’re proud to officially announce the United States of America’s gold standard childhood vaccination recommendations. That has to do with many subjects including autism in particular,” Trump said at the beginning of the order signing.

“I’ve seen proof of it, where they have a vaccination where it looks like the size of a bottle of soda, poured into a little child’s body and bad things happen in too many cases,” Trump later said on breaking up each shot into an individual medical visit, before adding: “This is an explosion, it’s an epidemic,” in an apparent reference to autism.

>I'm not a trump fan, but the antivax train has nothing to do with him.

Well not nothing. But it predates him and he adopted the movement early in his political career. When I was in high school (2004-8) antivax sentiment was generally associated with liberal Democrats in places like Marin County. This was a favorite retort of conservatives when confronted with their own backwardness on scientific understanding of evolution and climate change. In 2015 Trump began courting the anti-vaccine crowd and the political valence of that flavor of woo-woo nonsense flipped seemingly overnight. It was surreal to see it happen in real time. By 2020 he had lost control of the monster he helped create and the crowd booed him when he said they should get the Covid vaccine.

I think you are partially correct. They trained AI on their articles to produce the same style articles. I am not a large consumer of BBC articles. This style of snippet after snippet is annoying. Perhaps that is why I am not a large consumer of BBC articles.

> Style Assist helps BBC journalists quickly adapt trusted content into BBC News house style, speeding up the publication of high-quality local stories. It uses a BBC-trained AI model to generate a draft, which is always reviewed and edited by journalists before publication. This helps save time while maintaining accuracy, tone and editorial standards. Find out more in an article from Rhodri Talfan Davies.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/reports/policies/what-were...

Such determination seems pretty subjective to me

The symptoms of Tony Blair take a long while to fully manifest and are significantly worse than TB.

There's also a difference between treatment and cure but we call it all a "vaccine" now (I prefer the transitional OED definition from pre 2019). We've already entered 1984s use of good speak especially around healthcare.

I kind of assumed that they actually meant UK. It's indeed confusing. I'd wish the BBC would use a consistent naming scheme.

Guess only England was meant. That would insinuate they don't care about scotland though.

The commonwealth is also a collection of countries ruled by the crown; but it's not a country whereas the UK is a country.

To make things worse, sometimes team GB competes :) (Edit: in other sports)

OK, so now we have the following terms: State, nation, country, sovereign country.

For example in Germany one would say there are 16 states, but one wouldn't say that there are 16 countries. Never heard anyone claim that. So state seems to be different from country, at least here. Would people in the UK say that Scotland or Wales are "nations"? Or is at least that term very clearly only for units that could participate under a flag in lets say the olympics? (I assume here, that Scotland and Wales are not separately competing, but are under UK flag.)

No one is confused if you can the UK a country, or if you call England, Wales, or Scotland a country.

You might get a tedious person saying something like "actually, Wales is a principality".

I'm English and I don't think England or Scotland or Wales are countries. People get confused because of football and rugby. They're nations. The country is the United Kingdom.