Slashdot Mirror
HIV Vaccine
The Sexecutioner writes "WebMD is reporting on a new vaccine which has had an incredible effect in clinical trials. The vaccine, composed of human dendrites holding dead HIV viruses, has dropped test patients' viral load by up to 90% in one year. Could this be it?"
While I am glad that we may have found the cure to HIV that kills millions every year, I wonder if the vaccine will be affordable to those unfortunate ones?
I got a feeling that only those wealthy people can afford to get fixed up, but most of them caught HIV due to their irresponsible action. Yet innocent victims who caught the disease, for instance by birth, may never see the light.
It seems like most medical findings are "open-source", that you can read about them in journals, but the actual cost to produce a medicine is usually very prohibitive.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
I'd imagine that this sort of therapy could be useful against a whole range of viruses since (as I understand) it operates by training the immune system rather than crippling something specific to the virus the way that other HIV treatments do. If that'd work for most viruses, maybe someday people will be able to just update their own virus definitions a few times a year -- of course, most of them probably wouldn't bother and then call me for support when they open some damn .exe file
they got in their friggin' email and... Sorry, started drifting there for a second.
Of course, it's awfully early to get too excited given this is just 18 people in Brazil so far, and "incredible effect" might be a bit strong since only 44% of the very small number of test patients are still showing the full benefit after one year, but I suppose any good news in this sort of scenario is, well, good news.
PS: Am I the only one who finds it darkly ironic that "The Sexecutioner" submitted this story?
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
dendrites are whole-tissue from the CNS...the best way on earth to pass on prion diseases. No Way is this going to become a vaccine until that little fear is put to rest!
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
Sexecutioner writing about AIDS. Hard to think of one more fitting.
It would be nice though.
DAMN YOU OCTODOG! DAMN YOU TO HELL!
How much you wanna bet that it won't be approved for use because, I don't know, say, it causes liver failure in 1% of the recipients or something.
Unknown host pong.
I sincerely hope this is it.
If it is, my only apprehension is that countries who need it most will not be able to afford it.
Go ahead and search, you will never find it all, I am baking muffins as I speak. - ComicBook Guy
I think you'd kind of HAVE to test the vaccine for an incurable illness on those with the illness already. Because the line would be very short to test it if they needed fresh blood.
So it might be a vaccine in early stages of testing.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
I always hear about vaccines involving "dead" virus material. But I thought viruses weren't alive in the first place; that they were essentially protien envelopes containing viral DNA or RNA. Can anyone explain?
If they can make it for 30 cents per dose, maybe.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
I dont know, but if it is, does this mean you (The Sexecutioner) will be out of a job?
The Sexecutioner must not be too happy now that one of his favourite 'tools' has been nerfed.
THe real question is does its effect at combating the virus continue and improve? Dropping the viral load count dosn't mean much if it only works once and or dosn't ever wipe it out. Besides this sounds more like a treatment (which is more profitable) than a vaccine (which is what you get so you never get aids)
I really hope we're making progress on this, this virus is really killing a lot of people.. I also would love for some of these bigger viruses to be sorted with, then perhaps we can start working on the smaller, non-life threatening type viruses that we "live with" because they're not considered too threatening.
What I do fear though, is if we have a 'cure' then the fear of catching a deadly STD starts to fade away, even though there are other serious STD's out there still.
I remember being very afraid after waking up the next day.. then on I've been very careful and have been tested.. Simply don't want to trash more lives then my own if I did do something stupid.
You''ve got to have that word in there.
It's a vaccine because it "teaches" the immune system how to deal with HIV - at least to the extent of keeping it from getting worse, and in some percentage of cases, enough to drastically lower the viral load and rate of transmission.
But it's not a PREVENTIVE vaccine like most widespread vaccines, and it can't be mass-produced since it uses material from each patient and is custom-made for them.
It's still potentially a great leap in terms of treatment of HIV/AIDS, though.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
I just read this.
Apparently Brazil is ready to go ahead and break the patent of several drug companies because they can't afford to pay for them.
New drugs are great but only if you can afford to take them.
evil is as evil does
Vaccine all in the westen world can afford like most vacvine, and then last for a life time.
The theory sounds easy enough for anyone to handle.
But it requires 2 items from the patient's body.
#1. Dendritic cells
#2. Dead virus
This doesn't sound like something that can be mass produced which means that the price will be high for most of the world.
Well, it's a trade-off: we want private companies to invest billions of dollars to develop medicines we need, but they'll only do so if there's the potential for profit. If there isn't, capital will flow out of drug companies's R&D budgets and into car manufacturers or something.
Governments that want to make a new life-saving drug available to all, not just those who can afford it, are free to subsidize it. Citizens and governments in wealthy countries who want to make the drugs available to citizens of poor countries can likewise fund it.
It's easy to paint a company as horrible because it wants to charge a lot of money for a life-saving new treatment. But in many cases that treatment wouldn't exist if the company couldn't make money from it.
I should buy some cement.
Shortly we'll hear about how someone has attach phase change cooling nanobots to the dendrites to allow them to be overclocked, and reduce the viral load by 90% in six months.
Then the lucite dendrites with cold cathode illuminated ribosomes will hit the market.
Then someone will build a nano-lego dendrite.
Then someone will make a stop action film of dendrites performing the Camelot song from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Then someone will tell us all about how the Amiga had that same feature 20 years ago.
And finally, someone will announce an improved vaccine/therapy that eliminates HIV instantly, but it will link to goatse.
Its great and all that we have this vaccine, but the people of the world will still need proper education on the way the virus spread. religious leaders (especially african catholic bishops) are saying that condoms cannot prevent aids, also people like bush who say that th eonly way to prevent stds is abstinence. once we got rid of aids, we oughtta get rid of those religious conservatives, theyre not doing us any good
perpetually dwelling in the -1 pits
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Shouldn't it be "virii"?
No, it shouldn't
Curing pandemic diseases like HIV is not only a slap in the face of Darwin, but it can only cause more problems with overpopulation down the road. If no one died from anything except old age, would that be a perfect society or a hectic, crowded, unstable society?
But yeah, on a much smaller scale this is awesome, I don't think there is a person here who isn't connected to someone with HIV.
to catch the things that aren't in the summary.
This isn't a generic vaccine that's created in mass and given to everyone. The 'vaccine' is generated using viruses and dendrites from the specific patient. So it has to be done for each person. It reduces viral loads, but doesn't eliminate the infection.
Still it sounds really promising, but there's a LOT of work that would need to be done before this got anywhere close to general use. Also the article doesn't say how complex/expensive the process is per person. It doesn't sound like it's third world friendly, at least at the moment.
Therapeutic dendritic-cell vaccine for chronic HIV-1 infection
While this study (Nature Medicine Advance On-line publications Subscription required) shows promise, it is only a preliminary trial that included 18 participants. Sixteen of the participants were female and two were male. The figure stated in the /. article, of a 90% total drop in viral load, is not quite accurate. The article states that the patients plasma viral load levels were decreased by 80% (median) over the first 112 days following immunization. It then goes on to say that a prolonged suppression of viral load (up to 1 year after inoculation) of 90% was seen in only 8 individuals.
From my analysis of the HIV RNA expression data from this paper, after 1 year, eight of the patients had viral loads reduced by 90% or better, two patients had their viral loads reduced between 80% and 90% six patients had viral loads that were reduced somewhere between 10% and 50% and two of the patients actually had an increase in plasma HIV RNA levels.
"When Nature Calls We All Shall Drown" Johan Edlund
Let's let 'em DIE if they can't pay.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
of course you can control MS if you want. Screen to see if you're a carrier and then either abstain, adopt or abort. Stop being a judgemental cunt anyway.
Wow. Good timing.
the person who emailed me this morning said that an HIV cure was made from crocidiles, and it can also be SARS. He emailed me without me asking and used very poor grammar and a lot of random characters and offered no real scientific arguments, just a lot of jargon, so he must be a real scientist!
Monstar L
If you're really that concerned about over-population please kill yourself now. You'll be helping your own cause.
Are homosexuals going to do to self-destruct? More drugs? It's an evolutionary imperative, since they're a dead-end.
After seeing that paralyzed woman walk for the first time, now this?
Its a uber week BUT how concrete is their statement? Ah...
I'm assuming you're trying to be funny...
Advanced users are users too!
Is this a vaccine or a medicine? There is a difference, isn't it? A vaccine is meant to build immune defence, while medicine fixes the body when the damage has already been done. So which one is it? I see contradicting comments, so it would be nice to have this cleared up.
The AMIGA must've had it 20 years ago.
Have you ever heard of an HIV-infected Amiga? Case closed.
As long as it isn't you, right?
Flamebait nothin- that was funny:)
Let's apply Occam's Razor here.
On one hand, we can claim that the West created a virus designed to kill Africans, but yet still somehow manages to kill millions in North America/Europe; not particularly effective from a genocide point of view.
Another, perhaps more practical point of view, is that sex education and safe-sex practices are far less common in Africa. The lack of knowledge about STD's and the absence of the rule of law in many parts of Africa would make a far more effective explanation.
If we take Ms. Maathai's explanation, then food must obviously also be a genetically engineered weapon, since millions more in Africa die from starvation than those in the West.
No.
Most of the drugs that are sold in Canada are produced in the EXACT same factories that produce the drugs that are sold into the US market.
That is why most of the packaging is the exact same with the addition of French.
Great idea : it may be of use for patient with resistance to all known anti-retrovirals. But...
It is NOT a vaccine. It is NOT a cure. It's a temporary (at best) treatment. The title is highly misleading. And its far from practical. You need to isolate dendritic cells from an (infected) patient, which is costly, require specific equipment and isn't trivial (forget developing countries, which can't even afford AZT). Then you pulse these cells with killed HIV, which I assume should come from the patient (else soon the treatment will go ineffective due to mutations acquired by the virus) and you reinject the cells, which will go 'alert' the immune system that something is wrong. So mass scale treatment is out of question. Basically, you're only boosting the (ineffective) immune system against HIV-1. After a year, their treatment reduced viral load by 90% in 8 of 18 patients. 90% isn't a lot (anti-retroviral do a lot better than that), and they aren't even achieving 50% success after a year. I would imagine that after 2 or 3 years, the success rate is even lower. And the CD4 count is stable, not increasing to normal levels.
So no, its not 'it'. Don't hold your breath either.
Eureka Science News - automatically updated
You'll know when its it. To quote the late great Bill Hicks, when there's a one shot cure for AIDs they'll be fucking in the streets.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
It's called, "Don't have sex with random people". Works fine for most of Earth's population.
- Scrooge
Not if those 10% can mutate and rebound.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Every couple years another story like this comes along claiming to have very promising results. The result always seems to be the same. The story goes away and we never hear about it again. So I tend to view this "Is this the cure for HIV/AIDS?" stories with about the same amount of skepticism that I view the "New Technology Will Solve World's Energy Needs!" stories. When we actually see large populations of people being cured by something, that's when I'll start celebrating.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
released the day before world aids day? hmm!
Will this end up like all the other aids drugs which never reach the people in 3rd world counties suffering from the disease
The stuff might start off expensive, but eventually the process will be refined and more mass producable. A lot of processes start off like that: at first only the wealthy can afford it, then it becomes more common and mainstream.
The important thing is to get the initial process or idea out there in the first place. Then you can get people to work on it and refine it. But you need the right balance of: reward the inventors vs allow others to mass produce it.
If you don't reward the inventors, then you take away the incentive to think this stuff up. But on the other hand you can't let them keep a monopoly on it forever.
Ok - so some folks (and not those on /., I'm sure) claimed that HIV was a punishment sent by God for Gays (and hemophiliacs, and innocent realatives of people having multiple sex partners.)
If this vaccine tests out, what would this mean metaphysically? God is now happy? If so, what have we done to appease Him, other than encourage safe sex?
This vaccine will likely ensure that Chinese culture and its perverse mentality will survive.
Hence, I am ambivalent about this vaccine.
They're also extracted from the patient himself, which means no chance of tissue rejection or secondary infection. It does mean it'd be really hard to mass produce though.
I can see the fark headline now.
HIV Vaccine reduced viral load by 90%. Still no cure for Cancer, but this is also nice.
END COMMUNICATION
Dropping the viral load count dosn't mean much if it only works once and or dosn't ever wipe it out.
Man, I couldn't disagree more. If the viral load drops to 10% and stays there (and the current results indicate that it does), then the illness won't progress to AIDS, which is the real problem with HIV. Sure, the patient may end up carrying HIV for life, but who cares, at least they won't *die*.
Dendritic cell vaccination does work on an individual basis - there are studies here, at NYU Med, that focus on using this technique to combat bloodborne cancers.
However, what the article fails to mention is that viral load is a really bad indicator of HIV progress. Good anti-retroviral therapy will give a viral load drop that's LARGER than 90%. Considering that the end-result is the same, since the virus has reservoirs outside the hematopoietic system, this study just proved the general usefullness of the technique, but the way this information was presented, it made it appear as if there was NO (or very limited) CLINICAL USEFULNESS for treatment of HIV.
P.S. I haven't looked up the actual clinical trial publication, but I will do so later tonight and update my point of view if it changes.
IMHO this might be a dangerous treatment. How is this different from the "white" in Star Trek that keeps the Jem'Hadar alive?
AIDS does have low grade secondary transmission vectors. Consider. It has been known for more than a decade that mosquitoes can harber AIDS for at least 12 hours. If over 99% of the population is AIDS free then the likelhood of a mosquitoe carrying AIDS and picking on a new victim is extremely low. However if 50% of the population has AIDS then the likelihood is quite significant.
IMHO the epidemiologists have not come to grips with this.
I think the best way to prevent this sorta stuff is for people to control their privates. Seems like it would solve a lot of problems.
There is a lot of talk in this thread about cost. Anyone know how much a drug cocktail costs now for someone with AIDS? I imagine that they will be glad to pay the cost for a once a year shot.
Nope- not a chance. By the worst estimates, HIV will have only infected 120 million people by 2015- the world's population is pushing 7 billion, so this is less than 2% infected with HIV. If that's the reason you're giving for wanting AIDS to continue, sorry, it's just not contageous enough.
BTW, world population is already AT a managable level- the real question is are we willing to do what it takes to manage it at this level (things like accept a falling standard of living, stop charging money for basic human needs, choosing environmentally safe technology, and not using antibiotics). If we're not willing to do that, it doesn't matter what level the world population is at- we could be only 100,000 and still manage to kill ourselves off completely by environmental poison, starvation and superbugs.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
We are all going to die.
The US has a negative population growth rate and is supported by immigration. Do breed and you're helping a lot. Have 6 kids your probably just trying to spread you stupid religion on the rest of the world.
If I live in Africa and choose to have unprotected dry sex with a prostitute am I choosing to die? Hell yes. If I am a white upper-class male having unprotected sex with a drunk girl after a party am I choosing to die? Probably not. Risk rewards ratios guys.
Either way there are way too many fucking people on this planet and if you look at any population curve we are in deep trouble. If AIDS cuts the population of SE Asia and Sub Saharan Africa by 75%-90% is that really a bad thing? Once again I don't mean from a personal story view where any human being would be brought to tears but from the planet wide all in one fucking boat not enough material to go around view.
There are two kinds of death, death after you pass on your genes e.g. cancer, parkinson's, etc. and things that kill you quick ebola, avaian flu, small pox. I'm just saying wiping out the quick one leads to overpopulation in the long run.
This is all academic anyway the story says it's made from human dendrites so it will be HUGE bucks for this shit.
Note that this research is being done in brazil and france, and so I doubt it is being funded by the so-called "free market" (yeah, right) profits from American pharmaceutical companies. You know the ones, those that are ripping us off, and paying Rush Limbaugh to spread propaganda about how we Americans are carrying the rest of the world with our free market (yeah, right) healthcare system.
Oh, by the way, France has nationalized healthcare--anyone walks right in and gets healtcare without paying. Real good system. Oh, yeah, that's right. We Americans are subsidizing their healthcare by paying for all this research.
Hmm. So that's why this vaccine to beat AIDS is coming out of France and Brazil.....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Interesting, but is it relevant? VIRUSMYTH http://www.virusmyth.net/ has people with some impressive credentials making some interesting claims that HIV and AIDS are not related; and that HIV doesn't exist.
There is no such thing as a dendritic cell in the CNS. Dendrites components of a neuron that extend from the cell body to communicate with neighboring neurons. A previous poster has already given an accurate definition and resource discussing the dendritic cell as a part of the cell-mediated immune system.
"Welcome back to the land of the living! Now grab a shovel and get back to work."
I hope this vaccine would work. Definately would help straighten out the third world better. They already have so much else against them.
God spoke to me.
Is orgies time baby.
Somebody call 911 the amount of christians having seizures will be out of this world.
When you're thinking of pussy, just think oralse.cx.
Dropping the viral load count dosn't mean much if it only works once and or dosn't ever wipe it out.
I imagine that for many infected patients it could mean remaining healthy (and alive) for maybe another 5 years. That would sure mean a lot to me.
..in Japan.
"It s horrible thing to say but I was hoping AIDS could push world population down to a mangeable level."
You're right! Let's start with you.
It's always easy to make such comments until you're the one affected.
thats not entirely true either. i happen to work in the canadaian pharmaceutical industry and i would say that the no 1 reason that Canadian drugs are cheaper is that US patents run longer than Canadian ones. So a medication like fosamax can have a generic in canada a few years before the US industry can start producing one.
I dont work in the legal department, but i believe Canadian drug patents are good for ~5 years and US patents are ~8 years. after that time, companies like novopharm and other generic producing companies, can start churning out generics. even the big brand name companies (ie pfizer) have generic producing lines. this is primarily for overseas markets. in fact, alot of drug companies will manufacture the same drugs, with different names and pill shape/size, based on whatever region they are marketing in. a good example of this is reactine/zyrtec. those two medicines are the EXACT same. in canada however, you dont need a perscription for it an its called reactine. the length-of-patent experation numbers might be off but alot of the lower cost can be put squarely on the messed up US patent system.
Countries like New Zeland and the UK also have similar patent laws.
I have also heard, that the comapnies in fact do price medication higher in the states because they feel that thats what the market will bare. I dont think that the grandparent was that far off from the truth.
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
Looks good to me, wild un-protected sex rampages at cheap thai whorehouses here we go!
LOL.
Someone thought: "Damn, Eric Cartman's threatening to go over and have unprotected sex with people's mothers, better mod that flamebait."
Kudos to whoever did that, sometimes the moderation on slashdot is more humorous that the posts.
-dameron
I know it isn't PC to say this, but we need AIDS and maybe 3-5 more plagues like it.
We have 7 billion people on this planet.
If the 1st World can cause so much environmental problems, while only being a small minority of the population, what do you think will happen when India & China try to make the jump to 1st World wealth?
We obviously don't have the backbone to control our population growth on our own. We obviously don't have the resources to eliminate poverty and suffering with just 1 planet. And, forcing birth control on people would "violate their human rights" (to breed like lemmings).
We desperately need some mechanism to keep the human population in check.
Even given the suffering caused by plague, war (the next likely alternative) is a Hell of a lot worse.
Reports that state that the population "may" level out at 9 billion are nice, but that doesn't solve any problems. We still don't have the resources for 7 billion. Do you think we'd suddenly have the resources for 9?
The number 1 environmental problem on the planet isn't cars, oil, or tree farming, it is population. That is the controlling variable in the equation. The other things don't help but they are ultimately secondary. They only effect things is there are people to use them.
Plus, we already have a cure for AIDS.
Wear a condom.
Christ, they beat that into my head during the late 80s. I really have little sympathy for a problem that only effects the extremely negligent.
If everyone used condoms, we'd just have people that got AIDS via the odd blood mishap. Them I can feel sorry for.
It is NOT a vaccine
Of course, it's a vaccine. It's a "therapeutic vaccine".
It is NOT a cure. It's a temporary (at best) treatment.
No, it's not a cure and it may not be a very good treatment. But neither of those observations has anything to do with it being a vaccine.
I'm sorry if you don't like the official terminology, but that doesn't mean you can just change it.
Furthermore, the discovery that anything can create a somewhat effective immune response against HIV is a major breakthrough.
Honestly, I'm not sure it's a great swap. Although the take-up of prions is relatively unknown, and it's thought that there's a genetic component to prion-related diseases. But that's also unknown.
Mind you, as nobody has explained how something the size of a prion can (a) survive the stomach, (b) pass through the stomach walls, (c) avoid the human immune system, which does Nasty Things to foreign proteins, (d) get through the blood-brain barrier, (e) miraculously avoid affecting any other protein in the human body, being stored anywhere, or even remain in the bloodstream, as ONLY the brain and spinal cord seem to be affected and (f) survive unbelievably high temperatures, I still have a hard time accepting the prion theory.
It's the best theory out there - in fact, it's about the only theory out there - but the gaps bother me. The explanation, as it stands, just doesn't feel right. That's not very scientific, I know, but beauty and elegant simplicity tend to be hallmarks of those theories which endure, with the removal of extra entities to explain a greater bredth of phenomina.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Stop screwing every thing you see.
AIDS pisses we off because the solution is obvious.
No, I'm not about to go off on some fundamentalist rant about "Homo fags bring it on themselves!". It's not just a gay thing. Here's an idea for preventing HIV;
Stop having unprotected sex with strangers you don't trust.
There, was that so hard?
Think Globally, act Locally
Writers imply. Readers infer.
Its been 22.3 years.
What is in the vaccine is not important. The difference between a treatment and a vaccine is that the treatment attacks and kills the pathogen, or just alleviates symptoms. A vaccine acts like the pathogen, causing an immune response that attacks and kills the pathogen, or a cellular response that stops the pathogen from being destructive.
Vaccines do not have to be made from live or dead specimens of the pathogen - they can also be made of specimens of a similar pathogen (smallpox vaccine is made from cowpox, for example), or anything that mimics a critical part of the pathogen closely enough to trigger an immune/cellular response.
People tend to think the difference is that vaccines PREVENT disease and treatments treat disease only because most people get vaccines before they have a chance to be exposed to a disease. If you somehow ended up with Polio or Smallpox or whatever, they'd still give you a vaccination to get your body to take care of it (and that's what they did back when they first created the vaccines).
paintball
We already beat the shit of natural selection when we developed agriculture. In the good old days before technology if you made it out of childhood, you were doing pretty damn good. These days I think the US infant mortality rate is well below 1%.
HIV is a drop in the bucket when it comes to deaths. HIV has a minimal impact on population growth, even in African nations. In the US and Europe, HIV has no noticeable impact. If overpopulation is really your concern, burning farms and getting rid of antibiotics would do a lot more.
Over population isn't the problem. We have been overpopulated beyond what nature can allow for thousands of years. The question is now what we can do to curb population growth, but what we can do better handle a large population. Seeing as how we are at 6 billion + strong and living longer then ever, I would say we are doing a pretty good job.
Cancer is not 1 disease. It is more like 1,000 seperate problems that cause similar but not idential effects.
Plus, think how far we have come with AIDS in so little time.
It took us 6,000 years to beat syphillus. It took use a mere 20 to get AIDS from a deadly problem to one that is merely a nuisance chronic condition if you have access to the drugs. (But you know polio is only a trivial prblem if you have access to the drugs. So, that is a bit of a given.)
Well, this is the article that made me want to finally post a comment...
So here it is, as uninsightful as it is..
First off, I'm questioning the viability of this article, it could all be a sick joke, from where I'm standing at least... the news almost sounds "Too good to be true" so I mean... which part is the bad part, there has to be a downfall, a facility, something wrong with it all, because that's the way the world works...
Where's the wall that we still haven't found a way around?
Or is this truly one of the most amazing breakthroughs (in my opinion) to the scientific community?
...of AIDS, maybe.
They'll still *die* at the end of their life - dying is actually a key metric in determining the end of life.
Writers imply. Readers infer.
The logical thing is to lower the price on critical core medications, so that they're in the reach of most or all people. This keeps the customers alive, and therefore increases the amount they can buy from you. Furthermore, people tend to shop with people they like. They're likely to like you, if you've just saved their neck.
Cheap life-saving drugs would create a bigger, more loyal, market which is likely to create repeat demand. THAT is where the real money lies.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The day they found a cure for AIDS
The day they found a cure for AIDS
Everybody took one little pill and was okay
The day thay found a cure
The day they found a cure for AIDS
Everybody took one little pill and was okay
I slept with Cindy and Martha and Sue
I slept with Julie, Melissa and Kate
The day thay found a cure
The day they found a cure for AIDS
Everybody took one little pill and was okay
The people who had plotted to get rid of all the gays
Admitted their guilt and everything was fine
Everybody else said, I din't know
The day they found a cure
For 6 months, no one went to work, they all had orgies
Morning after pills were sold in grocery stores and gas stations
The day they found a cure for AIDS
Everybody took one little pill and was okay
We rented dirty movies and ordered out for food
For 3 solid weeks everyone I met was nude
I slept with Julie, Melissa and Jake
Nobody was afraid
The day they found a cure
The day they found a cure
The day they found a cure, for AIDS
... now all you need is a "machine" to combine them! Think about the possibility of a drug which, after injected, ties itself to the dendritic cells and starts hunting in your blood for dead viruses, then replaces itself with the dead virus body -- hey, you've just produced a vaccine!
The bottom line is that now that the positive effect is demonstrated, the next step is to find out the cost-effective way to combine cells and dead viruses, preferrably in-viro. Let's hope that someone will manage to do it!
Paul B.
Yes, it's a horrible thing to say. And I find it interesting that I've repeatedly heard people praise the population control potential of AIDS, but never the various strains of flu, or other diseases. Read into that what you will.
The Sexecutioner submits an article about an HIV vaccine. Is that supposed to be funny or scary?
No, this is medical science, radical advancements in intercity personal human transportation are mechanical-electrical engineering.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
My web domain.
Either way there are way too many fucking people on this planet and if you look at any population curve we are in deep trouble.
You realize that this problem will take care of itself, right? When an environment can't support a population, the population's size decreases until it gets to a manageable level. It makes no sense to promote death as the solution for overpopulation when death is the consequence that you're trying to avoid.
We desperately need some mechanism to keep the human population in check.
And that's why we invented nuclear weapons.
Nature likes balance. Technology allows us to push nature further out of balance without all dying. If we can develop technology faster than we continue to push nature out of balance, we'll be fine, if not, we'll all die, but at least there won't be anyone left to worry about it.
In the meantime, I have some consumption to do.
paintball
In the U.S. alone there are tens, if not hundreds, of drugs in trials for HIV-1. Here's a list of 67 of them. Many other compounds are being investigated in pre-clinical research.
More hope. That is good. But, realistically, many many of these so-called-at-the-time breakthroughs never materialize into treatments. Sometimes the study cannot be repeated, sometimes the economics of the cure are not feasible.
.
In the meantime, I think people with the disease should try and help themselves, through sites like http://www.keephopealive.org/
Others should practice safe sex, or just simply practice.
This seems like a recipe for disaster. What is to prevent the vaccine stock from being contaminated with prions that cause Creutzfeldt Jacobs Disease (the human version of mad cow disease). Injecting every potential person who could get AIDS (everyone on the planet) with human nerve tissue seems double plus ungood. Either the tissue used to generate the vaccine could develop prions or the chemical processing of the vaccine might generate prions.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I supose now they relize that they made a mistake and fell responsible.....so they finnaly release the cure they have been holding all there years. Makes perfect sense! ...and who is they?
When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up... reading.-Henny Youngman
usher in a new error of free love!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
America is the testbed for the pharmaceuticals. We also happen to sue the hell out of them often for bad medicines so drugs are expensive here.
"Besides this sounds more like a treatment (which is more profitable) than a vaccine (which is what you get so you never get aids)"
I would think, actually, that a vaccine would be far more profitable than a treatment. For rich people/countries, there are far more people who don't have AIDS and don't want to get it and will be willing to pay money to do so than there are sick people.
In the US, for example, there are believed to be about 1,000,000 people with HIV and would benefit from treatment. There are 292,000,000 people who would benefit from a vaccine.
Which market would you pursue?
There seems to be a lot of confusion as to what a vaccine is.
A vaccine boosts immune response to a disease agent. That's it.
The article refers to a vaccine used for therapy.
I always cringe when a medical piece is posted on slashdot. It's like watching english majors discuss computer science.
- biologist
This is more like an AIDS vaccine.
:-) However, I'm not sure it removes the symptoms from HIV.
It doesn't stop HIV infections, but it prevents them into evolving into full-blown AIDS and reduces the risk of infection. Which sounds pretty good too, of course.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
it seems like this method is kind of old hat, is this really the first time we've thought of weakening the virus and giving to patients? or just the first time its worked?
-Slex
if curing people from a deadly disease is morally right? really?
yes, it is morally right.
Lets not forget about all the other things you acn catch from unsafe sex.
Personally, ALL VD cures for men should involve sticking a tube into penis, blowing up a small ballon with tiny barbs on it, then have it forcefully removed.
This way we can still treat/cure the disease, but getting the disease would still be a deterent.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Like the idiot I am, I needed to go to How Stuff Works in order to find out more about AIDS/HIV. obligatory link
Now it doesn't take a senior pathologist to recognize immediately that, under microscope,
HIV looks a helluva lot like that AOL bastard.
and now back to the fallout shelter...
I hope that this vaccine is available to all who need it - whether they're rich, poor, or have been foolish enough to commit some act that left them affected. Our feelings are irrelevant, however, from a public health point of vieew - ending the HIV / AIDS epidemic is a great good unto itself.
On the issue of "irresponsible action", I understand your point. You're right - many of the people who will be able to afford the vaccine without governmental assistance probably did do something stupid. I don't care. I want them to live and have a healthy life.
Each of us does stupid things. I've raced my car when I shouldn't have. I was an idiot in college, and a fool at times. I'm healthy, though, through both fortune and comon sense. And I've seen friends contract HIV, and one of them has died. Did they do stupid things? Absolutely. But we all make mistakes, and we shouldn't have one stupid mistake be a death sentance.
All of us our human, all of us have flaws. Thank whatever good exists in the universe that there now is a chance to save more people from an agonizing death.
/* Dang, I can't type that well. */
While I don't disagree with your comments in general, I must disagree with you're statement "It is NOT a vaccine."
A vaccine is defined as:
Which is exactly what they created. It's a therapeutic vaccine, rather than the more common preventative vaccine that people are accustomed to.
There ya go! You spit out that scripted response in good time. Was that Rush Limbaugh healthcare script #3 or #4?
eat shiat and bark at the moon
= 9J =
Actually, the AIDS education groups have more money at their disposal now than they are able to spend. Most of them have not been able to scale their operations as fast as the US government, WHO, and other governments and private groups have been increasing funds. They are also having problems coordinating all the different aid groups and governments to get treatment/education where it is needed.
... well here is an article in the economist . It mainly talks about some peoples complaints with the money that is being given (mostly that it could go farther if the people giving it didn't require it to be spent in certain ways), but gets into some of the logistical issues towards the ends. Don't know if this article is available to nonsubscribers - googling for variations of the words 'ACHAP PEPFAR overload' might find other references.
trying to remember where I read about this
Are all of your 800+ posts this pointless and pedantic?
While France offers socialized medicine, there is not much difference between French pharmaceutical companies and American pharmaceutical companies. The only difference is that the French government is the one who ends up paying for the treatment. But the same companies when they sell in the USA, will get Americans to pay up just as much as Pfizer and other American conglomerates would.
Today is World AIDS Day.
When's the last time you had the opportunity to visit the brilliant french national health care system? oh yeah, never.
If the price is too high for PMPRB, the drug never comes to Canada. Take for example, Lantus Insulin. Of course Banting would turn over in his grave if he knew how much companies were now billing for advances in his discovery, but I digress.
The key difference between a Programmer and a Senior Programmer is that one of them is Mexican.
The major impediment to the spread of antiretroviral (AZT etc) drugs, sex education, and general information about HIV in south africa, until recently, has been the national government.
Mbeki has stated publicly on multiple occasions that the cause of HIV has not been proven to be a virus (yea yea i know), and that the major cause of HIV infection in his country is poverty.
Things have turned around in the last year or two, with antiretrovirals finally being brought into the country due to mass demonstrations in his country.
That said, money has nothing to do with it if your government is lead by people who refuse to look at the facts.
And on a side note, dont knock college required classes without them I would have absolutely no detailed knowledge on the subject aside from HIV is bad in africa.
=P
France also has a great public pension system.
It's amazing the things you can afford when you don't have to pick up the big-ticket items, like a national defense.
The development of an AIDS vaccine is wonderful news for sure, but it is still not a cure at this point (it is only a treatment that keeps the disease at bay at this point). What's at least as important (if not more) is education as you have pointed out.
The problem is getting the third world (where the epidemic is most serious) to accept western medicine. Westerners think African-witch-doctor medicine is a bunch of bunk--well Africans have the same opinion of much of western medicine. Even if this vaccine WAS a cure, getting poor, illiterate Africans to accept treatment would require a lot of education and convincing (not to mention money that most of these victims do not have).
The most perverse myth in some African cultures is that STDs (including AIDS) can be cured in men by having unprotected sex with a virgin girl. I shudder when I think about how many HIV+ men there are in Africa who think they are cured because they have done this, but in fact may have infected some young woman and the child she might have conceived as a result--then in the mistaken belief that they are cure go on to infect other sexual partners. Somehow putting that myth to rest would do more to combat AIDS than the most expensive drugs currently available.
There is even a problem in the "educated" west too--it is that we are perhaps TOO educated (but in the wrong way). All this emphasis on advanced treatments for AIDS is making some people perceive the disease as no longer a death sentance but rather a chronic disease. The attitude when engaging in risky behaviour is becoming "Uh oh...I might have exposed myself to HIV...oh well, nowadays HIV is treatable like hepatitis and herpes--it would be a pain in the ass to have to treat it but I'll live alright anyways".
The homosexual communities of large metropolitan areas are already having to combat this attitude (having previosuly become the most educated/aware segment of society concerning AIDS) and if we aren't careful the rest of the public will start believing this too. In actual fact, even if a person could live a normal lifespan with HIV, delivering a vaccine cusomised for each recipient and treating symptoms with an expensive regimen of drugs would be another big burden on the healthcare system, not to mention that the quality of life would be permanently reduced even with todays treatments.
Yes, this is an important development, but without education and empasis on personal responsibility AIDS won't go the way of smallpox any time soon.
na
After seeing that paralyzed woman walk for the first time, now this?
... ... ...
No corrections can be offered for this statement. It's far too disconnected. Seriously consider revising. Alternatly, please read your own posts before sumbitting.
Its a uber week
Possible corrections:
1) It's an uber week
2) It's uber weak
3) I'm mildy retarded
Well, it's because people often think that the ones affected are the people are the ones they'd miss the least if they died. I mean, people who have lots of partners (male and female) and intravenous drug users are the top contenders for the disease. Most victims got infected as a result of having sex or doing drugs. The "moral majority" that elected Bush wouldn't shed too many tears if they all dropped dead tomorrow.
Note: I do not feel this way. Death is almost always* a bad thing.
* Except in the case of spammers.
"In a 32-bit world, you're a 2-bit user. You've got your own newsgroup, alt.total.loser." -Weird Al
lets start the ORGY MAN!
Actually, of virus' five plurals, virora has the most distinctive ring; third declension neutra were always my fave.
The HIV is being carried by Dendritic cells (a member of the immune system that is known for helping T cells by being an antigen presenting cell), not dendrites...which are a morphological description of something on the cell. CJ
There's already a vaccine: Don't have sex with an infected partner.
What we need is a cure: After you are infected, beome uninfected.
- Yolego
The reason this work is coming out of Brazil is the same reason the spinal cord story earlier this week came out of Korea. Namely, ethics. The single greatest hindrance to scientific advancement in the US. In the US, it would be unethical to conduct this study, because you couldn't let a group of people go without HIV meds for a year. That would be unethical. It's the same way it's unethical to test experimental therapies on patients with terminal cancer. Since their disease is terminal, it can be argued that they are consenting out of desperation, and the researcher is therefore taking advantage of them.
In any case, dendritic cells were discovered in the US, HIV was discovered in the US, etc., so it can't be argued that the giant money machine of US science didn't contribute. It also can't be argued that the US does not lead the world in biomedical science. This is because we spend so much money on it that the best scientists from all over the world are concentrated here. However, I agree with you that this is not the same as the idiotic statement that we are subsidizing other nations' healthcare.
Also, it's important to note that HIV doesn't pick off the old, weak, and sick. It takes the young and healthy people, in the prime of their lives. Having that segment of the population removed in large numbers totally destroys a society, especially "developing nations" in places like Africa.
THe American military is NOT used to defend Americans. It is used to grab more profits for multinational corporations (so they can use the money to outsource our jobs); it is used to put down democratic leftist governments (to serve as an example to other countries that might want to do the same), so that the wealthy of the world do not have to worry about losing their billions.
Our military has never been used to defend the American mainland.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Although the potential of infection of AIDS is scary, it's nowhere near as dangerous as it is hyped to be.
For years, AIDS has been used to categorize and victimize specific groups (mostly gay men and coloured people in general). This created a lot of hype and pushed AIDS to the top of the chart of [scary font] DeSeAsEs To FeAr [/scary font].
The truth however, is that AIDS still manage to kill a relative minority of people, compared to other deseases.
A quick chart from Canadian residents can be found here: StatCan. I use this chart because it was easy to consult but these numbers are quite in line with those for the US: CDC
To summarize, Cancer should be given the scariest font and perhaps even the blink tag too. It scores a whoping 27% of desease-related deaths in Canada.
Compare this with 0.3% (yes, "zero point three") for HIV infection.
Hearth deseases come in 2nd with 26% and then the numbers drop sharply to 7% for cerebrovascular deseases.
Suicides score a whoping 1.7%. Still far more than HIV.
If I worked for WHO, my recomendations would be these: screw responsibly and slack off on smoking and the super-sized fries. Enjoy life. Be happy.
Not to be a nazi, but HIV is Human immunodeficiency virus. Therefore "HIV viruses" is something like FAT table, or LED diode.
And that's without going into viruses/virii debate. (viruses is correct)
AIDS/HIV is one of the few major diseases/viruses that is helping to keeps the worlds population down. With that gone, I guess we can expect something more potent next time round.
Nature knows best...
Obviously, the big problem is that people are not having safe sex (because they don't want to or are not able to). I worry that with news like this more people will practice unsafe sex. Eventually the AIDS virus will mutate and the problem will just resurface later.
I think it's vaguely funny in a disturbing sort of way that "The Sexecutioner" was the one to mention this story. Draw your own conclusions.
Against stupidity the Gods themselves contend in vain.
I dunno how much AIDS scare y'all, but I got a theory - the day they come out with a cure for AIDS. Guaranteed, one-shot cure. On that day, there's gonna be fucking in the streets, man. It's over! Who're you? C'mere! What's your name, baby? No, it's over, yeah, woo-hoo! Man, if you can't get laid on that day, cut it off.
Be careful not to use "proscribe" when you mean "prescribe." They are antonyms: "proscribe" means "to write a prohibition against," while "prescribe" means "to write a command to" (more or less). Pro- = against, Pre- = for, scribe[re] = write (in Latin).
The day after vaccination. Screwing the pooch, the poneys and the ho's. (in no particular order..)
>Everyone talks about Canada's "socialized medicine"
>being so different in principle than the United
>States', but really, when you think about it,
>that's exactly what an insurance company is
>supposed to be!
Yea, and there's other people who say how great the American healthcare system is. If that's true, then why did the family of a boy my sister was in junior high school with have to have bake sales and literally beg people for donations so he could get a heart transplant and not die?
Do Canadians have to turn into beggars to be able to get medical teatments to prevent imminent death? Or is their system more friendly to those who are gravely ill and they can get fixed up without the hassle of begging from your neigbors?
Sorry dude, but our system in the USA does have some problems.
Last country I remember bragging about their pharmeceutical testbed status was Nazi Germany.
See the Nuremburg trials for more about Bayer than you wanted to know.
That said, you're awfully blinded if you believe everything you hear about how much american research matters -- there is a lot of good research coming out of many other countries out there -- many of them the *parent* companies of those in the US.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Technocrat.net provides more links to other media reporting about this news, including to their source which is a paper published in Nature Medicine.
One fact is remarkable: its merely tested on mice and monkeys while 'the biological reaction of a given animal species to a given substance does not allow meaningful and reliable prediction of the biological reaction of humans. Extrapolation to man of the experimental behaviour of another species is hazardous and thus devoid of any scientific value.' (3rd link)
WE DON'T NEED NO BLOG CONTROL.
There is only 1 reason why the very same drugs in the U.S. cost more, than they do in other countries such as Canada.
... it's that consumers in U.S. accept greediness as a way of life, and somehow they think it improves the way of life in U.S. It's the only place where somehow the "have-nots" think that giving the "haves" and corporations tax-breaks will improve the "have-nots" standard of living, create jobs, etc ... believing more money for a corporation means they need to somehow expend it on creating more jobs? Last time I checked the point of a corporation was to make more money for it's share holders not give your lame a$$ a job. And if they do decide in the infinite benevolence of the corporation to create a new job, they are in fact going to give the guy half way around the world the job, who'll work for 2 cents an hour, cause prescriptions cost 20% less in their country.
0 &id=3895.
... I'm just dumb founded by it all. I guess it's the scare of communism, oh ... wait any moron wit half a whit understands communism and socialism are in fact two different ideas, where a state that is capitalistic (free markets) can be socialist and a state that is communist (planned economics) can also be socialist. Furthermore, how the h*ll did the states that actually recieve the most social aid, the poorest states, those southern states in the country go to Bush? Oh, wait, cause the average consumer in America is conditioned to f'k themselves. Pay, pay, buy, buy, ... feed the greed, feed the greed.
It has $hit to do with patent law, it has $hit to do with Canadas socialized health care, and has everything to do with the American Consumer is conditioned to essentially f'k themselves.
This the only country where people are conditioned to actually want to pay more for $hit, and drug companies know they can charge more here and people will still buy it, so they do. That simple.
F'k it oll about this R&D cost, patent cost, etc
Kind of same reason why the poorest states voted for Bush, as one satire read "Nation's poor wins election for nations rich", http://www.onion.com/news/index.php?issue=4045&n=
Machivelli would be proud, a system where the people believe f'king themselves improves their lives. Why are people frightened by a national healthcare system, dumb a$$'s we pay taxes anyway, atleast we get something in return for it? Seeing your tax dollars at work improving your quality of living, lowering the cost of prescriptions, especially for something so essential seems like most people would jump all over it. But nay I say.
Ugghhhhh
And that's why prescription drugs cost more in the U.S. That simple, nothing more to it. "In a word cause they can."
Like the parent said, it's a therapy, not a vaccine. It looks like it can help people who have been infected with HIV keep from developing AIDS, but it's not a cure and it won't prevent infection. Still, it's a welcome development.
The fact is, HIV is the most daunting disease we have ever faced. If it had hit even 50 years earlier we may very well have faced an epidemic on the order of the Black Death. It infects and kills stealthily, and evolves within our bodies faster than our immune systems can recognize it. If it hadn't hit the gay community so severely and specifically we might not have even been able to identify it, and it's only thanks to advanced sequencing and crystallography technology that we can study it in the necessary depth. But what is really sobering is this: HIV has infected tens of millions of people, living and mutating within their bodies for decades, and as far as we know no one has ever fought off an infection. The human immune system may very well be completely unable to handle HIV, and that means we may never see a traditional vaccine.
But we live in an age of rapid technological progress, and I do know of three promising possiblities that could actually prevent infection. None of them has yet been tested.
The first is another line of french vaccine work. Sequence comparison between various strains of the virus had identified a highly conserved protein region on the GP41 surface protein. The antibodies produced against the peptide seems to target the virus extremely well in the lab. So why don't we see antibodies against this epitope in the real world? It turns out we sometimes do - but those people can still get sick. It may yet be useful but based on that simple fact I'm not holding my breath.
The second hasn't even had an in vitro experiment yet and technically doens't prevent infection, but is a highly unusual and novel approach. Researchers at Berkeley have come up with the idea of a virus that is a parasite of HIV itself. The trick is that the antivirus cannot push the level of HIV too low, or the antivirus itself will die out and latent HIV will come back, which they were able to demonstrate thanks to computer simulations of the population dynamics. However, it can mute HIV activity and thus prevent infection from developing into full-blown AIDS. What's more, if the carrier happens to spread AIDS to someone else, the antivirus will go with it, and when HIV mutates the antivirus can still affect it. HIV would become a virus that people could live with without it killing them. But there is no way to know whether or not something unforseen can happen with what is essentially genetic engineering, and at the very least moving that research from the computer to the real world will be a real task. There is a lot of work to be done there.
The third technology could be the real deal. The fact is, some lucky people are resistant to HIV infection. Their CCR5 receptors are knocked out, and apparently HIV is unable to fuse with the cells as a result. Genetically altering your immune system to suppress this gene might thus offer protection against AIDS. However, that same mutation may be associated with multiple sclerosis. Again, nothing like this has ever been tried.
That's as far as I know, really. I regret that society and the government cynically ignored the epidemic when it was in far fewer people and might have been stopped with quarantine because it happened to affect a group that many people weren't fond of. I suspect now society may have to accept the inevitable and stop people from having multiple sexual partners. I fear the possiblity that HIV could mutate into something that can infect even without sexual contact in the meantime.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
Oops, forgot the link about the Berkeley work.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
I'm not saying I agree or disagree with the use of our military, but:
"Sometimes the best defense is a good offense."
Just playing devil's advocate.
Andrew
Read the rest of my message. Then read my followup. I'm hardly a proponent of the United States' health care delivery system. I was speaking in theoretical terms anyway.
... take care of yourself and try to avoid unnecessary contact with the medical system.
Sorry, dude, but Canada's system also has some serious problems. What it comes down to is that, if you want to stay healthy
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
The Motaba Team, of course ;)
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Yes, but if you RTFA, the 34.5% risk of becoming a zombie, cursed for the rest of the patient's days to walk the earth as an undead ravenous corpse hungry for sweet, sweet brains, was deemed acceptable by the FDA.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got a simply delicious batch of cervelles in the oven to attend to.
+++ATH0
*zzzzzt*
Free sex for all humans!
Just think if Microsoft also did drug patents what might happen. They would try to patent, software drug modeling, algorythms to model molecular self replication, software assisted bio-engineering, the use of the internet to search for bio assay data...what am I saying they most likely already do!
Minor electric currents have been proven to neutralize viruses.
http://www.padrak.com/beck
Royal Rife created a plasma tube that could kill pathogens by overloading their resonant frequency. www.rife.com
There is no objective, quantitative standard for HIV infection. There are no FDA approved diagnostic tests for HIV.
t im ate_question.html
See:
http://www.aliveandwell.org/html/questioning/ul
"You can be diagnosed HIV-positive if you possess antibodies formed in response to vaccinations, hepatitis, herpes, pregnancy, multiple infections or certain cancers. There are about 60 conditions that can trigger false positives."
HIV vaccination? You've got to be f*cking kidding me.
... albeit a pretty sick way of wanting to advance the agenda of population control.
Here's a question. What if a virus came about that randomly sterilized 50% of the population? How would you feel about that?
+++ATH0
HIV was discovered in the US
: _HIV_Discovery,_20_Years_Later.html, and you'll be able to find more informations.
Actually, no, it was discovered in France. While the complete research was done between a French (Montaigner) and an American scientist (Gallo), the actual discovery of the virus (not disease, virus) was done at l'Institut Pasteur by Montaigner and his team.
L'Institut Pasteur is a french public organization, owned and funded by the french governement.
In a quick google I found this link http://cbs5.com/news/local/2004/04/20/HealthWatch
And don't be lured, for pure science US doesn't lead the world in biomedical. The US leads the world in APPLIED biomedical. For fondamental research, many countries (such as France with Institut Pasteur) have roughly the same level and cooperate enough that none is leading.
But you seem more cogent than the other guy.
What if a virus came around that didn't kill but instead sterilized half the population of the planet randomly?
+++ATH0
They already do manufacture drugs: i feel like i'm on crack when I have to use Windows.
The article mentions the treatment of three brazillians who had been diagnosed with HIV and were becoming progressively worse in their "health". Apparently, they responded quite well to this treatment. Noteworthy is the term "treatment", as you cannot be cured. Sounds like cancer that is in "remission".
To know is to have knowledge....to understand is to be enlightened.
Thank you :)
Funny you should mention the Gates Foundation. The foundation has put together grand challenges in health that is a pretty interesting read. Some may say he's helping humanity because he wants more people alive to buy his products -- what a twisted thought. But deep down inside, he wants to make a lasting impression on the world, in all areas of technology, computers and medicine.
It's interesting to note, that the resounding theme of the grand challenges is that the quality of life for people in this world is not predicted by motivation, hard work, or intellect, but is largely influenced by one's geographic origin of birth. Hence, the grand challenges are not solely interested in new technologies, but bettering current technology to reach the masses.
Linux at home
From the article:
This approach requires that you already have the HIV infection. This does not protect you from infection. This is not a cure. This is a treatment. It isn't clear that this will prevent you from spreading the infection either. This MIGHT prolong your life expectancy or even improve the quality of your life.
To know is to have knowledge....to understand is to be enlightened.
let them die!!!!
"Could this be it?" no, it's not "it". "it" is a mass produced, 2 gram piece of latex that is designed to fit around your woodrow. use it.
Can I get a dose of whatever Magic Johnson is on? He's doing mighty fine for having AIDS. Oh wait, I'm short a couple of million. Oh well, see you on the other side.
gays make up somewhat less than 3% of the population, but are 44% of the HIV/AIDS cases. On the other hand, Blacks make up about 19% of the population and have 51% of the HIV/AIDS cases. While there is a little overlap (Blacks are more anti-gay than even most rednecks), it's not difficult to see what group statistically has a greater chance of being HIV/AIDS carriers.
This is not a cure. This isn't even a prevention. Indeed, it isn't a proven treatment. Read the article on WebMD closely and you will see what I mean. We don't know if the effects are long-term.
To know is to have knowledge....to understand is to be enlightened.
Didn't we completely eradicate smallpox like 70 years ago? Why don't we do the same thing with HIV? (Forgive me for not knowing the specifics.) If HIV is present in no human carriers, then the problem is solved.
Question everything
you forgot the OWN part. You have to extract your own cells and kill your own virus. This means it cannot be mass produced and would require a trip to your doctor and possibly the lab.
could this explain why some people with HIV never develop full-blown AIDS?
I'm pretty sure they call it treatment until they cure it. And I'm pretty sure that this is a relatively new experiment. So while you're right, you might only be right for a while.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
Step 1 - clone yourself
Step 2 - inject clone with your/its cells and "dead" virus.
Step 3 - see if T-cell count continues to drop in your clone.
Step 4 - If it's up, inject yourself. if not, go to Step 2. [new "deader" batch]
P.S. i don't know if your clone will have any immune system..I guess pumping it with dead viruses is one way to develop it...or kill your clone.
being i had a frend who was hiv positave and his wife died of aids. i knoe a bit abought the vires. hiv is hard to treat becuse anything you try to use to combat it it quickly mutates or grows immune to the treatments. thers quite a few 1 time wonder treatments that will destory 90% of the dessise. the problem is it isnt totaly destoryed and evently mutates again and returnes to normal. this treatment does sound like a effectiv treament couse there using dead cells to alert the immune system to its presence. couse of this methid there using even if it does try to mutate to avoide being destoryed they can simply adjust the treatment. so no its not a cure but with more work done to this methed it might be a cure or at least a very effectiv treatment that will keep working. if it becomes eyther they will defently find a way to make it affordable.
But we're not allowed to commit suicide. Make assisted suicide legal and you may well see people helping the voluntary human extinction movement.
Pereant, inquit, qui ante nos nostra dixerunt.
"Confound those who have said our remarks before us."
As it turns out, there has been a cure for HIV for years, but Pharmacom is keeping it from us so they can charge enormous amounts of money treating the disease instead of curing it and being done with it.
...and I hope it is, does that mean we can take the money currently being funneled into researching a disease that we have a complete understanding how it infects people and thus how to prevent it, and instead funnel it into older diseases that we still don't know why people get them, like some forms of cancer.
I don't want to be insensitive to aids victums, especially those who contracted it before we knew how it travelled, but I can say I know anyone personally who has aids, much less died of it. I can't count the people I've lost to various forms of cancer. I don't really have much pity cases where people get lung cancer by smoking or skin cancer by sun bathing 8 hours a day after it was common knowledge that these were unsafe things to do, but there are still countless forms of cancer that we just have no clue as to how or why people get them. The treatment is hell at best, and more fatal that the disease in most of the cases I've seen.
You've got to love it when the treatment it to chemically and/or radioactively poison the patient in the hopes of killing the disease before you kill the patient. I pray cancer treatment can advance fast enough that my kids will be able to look back on today's doctors as witch doctors for using such means.
I'm sure if Bill Gates got HIV/AIDS he would spend every penny he could to find a cure. However do not assume there is a direct cause and effect relation. To cure AIDS requires a mixture of knowledge, luck, time, and money.
Money is the easiest to provide. Bill Gates controls a lot. Many charities already do fund raisers to get money.
Only a few people hold knowledge in the right field (though I'm sure most /. readers could learn it), but worse than that, we simply do not know all there is to know. If the cure depends on knowledge that we will not discover for several hundred years, than a good cure will not happen for several hundred years.
Time can be bought only in small quanities, once you are talking the kind of money Bill Gates has (added to what is already being spent by others), you need to start at a lower level. Bill needs to start at a lower level, scholarships for anyone going into AIDS research is a good way to go, but it takes 4 years or more to get someone to this level. Results are not overnight. When you consider that lifespan after detection is 10-20 years (last I checked it was 10, but there have been advances since then), that doesn't leave a lot of time for the new researchers to get something working.
So in the meantime, keep those condoms on, and don't do anything stupid. It's not worth it.
Oh, wait, I'm on slashdot... !
Berto
I know everyone is talking about AIDS and I'd love to see a cure but I would also like to see a cure for the very common viral infection that 75% of the adult population has: Herpes. If you have ever had a cold sore, you've got herpes. Nobody likes to talk about it but odds are you have it. It is an annoyance similar to the common cold only more persistant in that like HIV it currently stays with you for life. Fortunately it isn't fatal and amounts to nothing more than a somewhat painful annoyance for a week or so. I look forward to the day we have the technology to effectively get this sort of virus under control.
English does not have a gender-neutral, singular, third-person pronoun. There have been many attempts to give it one. All are awkward, contrived, and distract from the actual content of the work.
Just use "he". It's the standard, and it always has been.
If that really, really bothers you, use "he or she", "s/he", or "she". Those are a little clumsy (the first two), but they are both widely accepted and valid English.
If it really, really, really bothers you, write in plural and use "they". Alternatively, use "one".
But Jesus, stop with the fucking Spisak pronouns or whatever the fuck these are. I understood your message fine as I read it until I hit "hir", where it slapped me in the face, broke my teeth, and made me lose track of what I was reading. It stands out like patchouli at a gun club.
Small amounts may be used for treating the poor, but huge amounts are used on cattle each year (well, in Australia at least). When its used on this scale, Im sure a few drums to a needy area are nothing to their profits...
m ec%20Pour-On%2051138.pdf
http://www.bayeranimal.com/pdf/msds/livestock/Bay
Now that we know how to make it it's really easy to duplicate.
/o: tree) of a neuron are its many short, branching fibers extending from the cell body or soma.
"The vaccine, composed of human dendrites holding dead HIV viruses"
The Dendrites (Greek, dendr
Easy, stip dendrites from infected cells and you got your vaccine. Not much really different from how modern vaccines are made now. They just kill infected cells and inject them into horses.
However your moralizing sickens me in other ways; Your so called 'irresponsible action' means nothing but a sotto voce slam on people who have it. That does not cover the millions in Africa doomed to die thanks to your sort of moral high-horse. Too bad we don't got a cure for that.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
You're missing the factor of corruption, or legalized corruption anyway.
One of the biggest reasons for drug costs in the USA is because of the pharmaceutical industry's massive influence in the government. Big Business in general seems to control our government in the US. They'll make sure that laws are passed which help keep their selling prices high.
Take a look at the article about PA passing a law pushed by Verizon stopping WiFi. That's one of those situations were there's no good reason for it, but the company managed to get a law passed which will undoubtedly help their profits.
The pharm companies have a stranglehold of the FDA, do you really think they'd allow a cheap alternative to reach our shores? If there was one, you could bet that they'd find some kind of legal complaint of why it can't be sold here, and then reach an "agreement" with the FDA that it can be sold after a hefty levy has been placed on the product which would enable them to stay competitive.
With the drugs from Canada issue, you're buying the same product produced in the same factories, but for a much cheaper price... but you're not getting it through the "proper" channel which they've set up here in the US to milk the most money out of us as possible. Their market research shows that if we had to, we'd pay the higher price and there's no way they'll let us pay anything but that higher price.
Oh come on now, think like an ass. This new treatment creates a whole new export for AIDS ravaged countries: aids infected human brains. Just imagine all of those potential costs being turned into assets. A 37% AIDS infection rate will be like hitting the jackpot! People in wealthy countries will pay top dollar. I'll bet the drug companies have already patented several business methods to harvest the product at minimal cost.
I am in a bad mood, that's for sure.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Where's the control group? Where's the diversity? For this to be a properly conducted experiment, there should be hundreds of people, not 18. There should be an even distribution of gender, ethnicity, age, etc.
There should be groups who are infected with HIV who get the treatment,
groups who are infected with HIV who don't get the treatment,
groups who are not infected with HIV who get the treatment,
groups who are not infected with HIV who don't get the treatment,
groups who are infected with HIV who think they get the treatment but actually don't (placebo),
and groups who aren't infected with HIV who think they get the treatment but actually don't.
I'm sure I'm missing a few more groups, but the point remains that this is hardly conclusive, or even an acceptable test.
What you reap is what you sow
Your second claim, I mean. Food is not a genetically engineered weapon, but the food distribution is certainly engineered. We have enough food on this planet to feed everyone already. People are still starving to death because of failures in global food distribution. Hell, could you imagine if all the coffee bean fields in the world were growing a vegetable like corn? Who could possibly go hungry?
Actually, no, it was discovered in France. While the complete research was done between a French (Montaigner) and an American scientist (Gallo), the actual discovery of the virus (not disease, virus) was done at l'Institut Pasteur by Montaigner and his team.
Ack, sorry about that one. You're right. I thought that HIV had been one of the HTLV retroviruses that Gallo's group had previously discovered, and Montagnier connected it to the disease. I used to work on HIV, a long time ago, and my memory of the historical details has faded since then.
And don't be lured, for pure science US doesn't lead the world in biomedical. The US leads the world in APPLIED biomedical. For fondamental research, many countries (such as France with Institut Pasteur) have roughly the same level and cooperate enough that none is leading.
Well, I agree with you that the US lead in applied biomedical science is more obvious, but I don't know how you can say that the US is not the world leader in basic biological science. I don't mean to imply that the best science comes from the US, only that the largest quantity of good science does. Nations like France and Germany have elite institutes like Institut Pasteur or the Max Planck that are as good as any institute in the US, but the US has more of them. Because there's a lot more funding here. And half the people in science in the US are from other countries anyway. This is a pretty commonly-held viewpoint among professional scientists. I can't find the citation now, but there was a thing in Nature or Science a while ago about how americans are afraid the US is starting to lose its dominant position (which is another way of saying that the US is in the dominant position). The article said that it isn't that the US is falling, but that other nations are starting to catch up. Which I think is great. Science is an international pursuit, and although I'm from the US, my allegiance is to science, not American science.
The figures are still somewhat surprising on their own, however - if a proper clinical trial is made with a non-trivial number of participants and the same steep drop in viral levels is noted, then perhaps this vaccine is a winner.
SCREW THE ADS! http://adblock.mozdev.org/ Proud user of teh Fox of Fire - Registered Linux User #289618
To everyone reading this thread, I suggest you check out http://www.duesberg.com/, the website of Dr. Peter Duesberg, Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology at UC Berkeley.
I found his site when researching a paper on AIDS, and after extensive reading of the site and the associated studies, it completely changed my understanding and outlook in regards to the 'AIDS epidemic'.
Continuing in that vein, you don't need a 'cure' for HIV... the HIV test already used today tests for antibodies to HIV... in other words, your body has already fought off the virus (and won, hence the antibodies). Why would you need a 'cure' for something you're already immune to?
I'm amazed that more people haven't heard what Dr. Duesberg has to say... it could very well change the entire AIDS research industry. There's no way I could summarize everything his site in this one post, so please check it out yourself if you get the chance.
Obviously, in a country that cannot pay for 'regular' drugs like AZT, these kinds of procedures are way too expensive. But, getting to a point were a vaccine can be produced that holds more general features, so that it doesn't need patient cells might be very useful.
Current research does seem to focus on very specific methods to lower virus loads, but the goal will be a vaccination program, because this will be the only solution that is both effective and affordable. The industries, however, can make more money of a normal drug, because that would require regular administration. A vaccine would cure the patient for a much longer time with only one treatment.
A Hepatitis B virus vaccination, for example, gives protection for at least 10 years.
Am I the only person who thinks that therapeutic treatments (like this one) designed to prolong the lives of epidemic disease carriers is actually a horrible idea in the long term? Looking at this from a purely survivability-of-the-human-race perspective, the idea of increasing the exposure of disease carriers to healthy populations is not so hot. Prevention/eduction is key, and a full cure would be fantastic, but an in-between solution just isn't good.
Ivermectin (under the trade name Ivomec) has been used for years by veterinarians on all large animals. And for the record, they rape both veterinarians and the farmers that use it. They may be able to give it away for free to the sub-Saharan Africans, but the McDonalds cheeseburger you just ate costs more because of it.
"No beer until you finish your tequila!" -Leela's Dad
"The most perverse myth in some African cultures is that STDs (including AIDS) can be cured in men by having unprotected sex with a virgin girl. I shudder when I think about how many HIV+ men there are in Africa who think they are cured because they have done this, but in fact may have infected some young woman and the child she might have conceived as a result--then in the mistaken belief that they are cure go on to infect other sexual partners."
It is extremely important to remember that this myth was common in Victorian England as well. The disease involved was syhphilis but the problem was the same.
At the time there was a brisk trade in girls who had been sewn back up.
There is no guarantee that there will be a resistant organism for any given infectious agent. Take the American Chestnut, for example. This tree was once the most common and largest hardware in the eastern US. An asian fungus arrived in the early 1900's and wiped them out.
AFAIK no truly resistant specimens have ever been found.
If AIDS cuts the population of SE Asia and Sub Saharan Africa by 75%-90% is that really a bad thing? Once again I dont mean from a personal story view where any human being would be brought to tears but from the planet wide all in one fucking boat not enough material to go around view.
Yep. And Bin Laden is trying to help, afterall planes in buildings are much more effective than the HIV.
In this particular case, have you considered US' own legal risk?. Perhaps "ethics" is being used as an excuse to justify the aversion of companies and shareholders to be exposed to a abuse-prone legal system. Think of a volunteer in those trials that decides to milk cash from the pharm co. that sponsors the study.
Research is already expensive as it is. Add to it the probability of incurring on unexpected legal costs and the whole thing becomes economically unfeasible -- especially when people and the legal system as a whole do not give a s*** to ethics.
A very valid point you have (in the words of Master Yoda). I suppose such a test would work, but still troubling me is the difference in how you contract, say, the flu, and how you contract HIV.
It's a very very long-term study, I would think, and you'd have to take a very very wide sample to counteract the whole problem of who's more responsible having sex (eg, a guy who uses condoms all the time is infinitely less likely to get HIV than a woman who slips up occasionally.)
I suppose the statistics are there for that too, and you could just interview people after a year and ask them about their habits, punching all the data into a massive number-crunching mainframe.
Haha. Massive.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
HIV cures you.
What I'd like to see is.
More grants being given to research students forthis kind of thing (though that means using tax$ instead of people paying at the bottom line).
Research could then be put under a 'national patent' so companies in the country that developed the technoligy could use it for free, but those in other countries would have to pay, that's the sweetner for the extra tax.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
I'm glad there making progress and the science behind it sounds worth a look at. I'll have to do a Google on that.
-- There are 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary, And those who don't.
If I'm not mistaken, a vaccine is something you give a person before infection. This requires both the dendrites and HIV of the patient who is already infected.
How on earth is that a vaccine? I mean, it may be the first step towards one, but that's not something that fits my definition of the word.
Is my definition wrong, or is this a poorly-named treatment?
-----------------------
You are what you think.
I could go to 50 beef farms and not see as much bull shit as was contained in the previous post.
I think it cures the person that gets it, but that they are still a carrier. SO a 'cured' HIV+ person whose profession involved unprotected sex would become a 'Typhoid Mary', spreading HIV to all the boys and girls who would then have to recieve the Vaccine themselves. And their children. Maybe someday, the whole human race will have to be innoculated with the vaccine at birth or come down with AIDS later in life. And then society collapses, and the ability to make vaccine is lost. And we all fall down.
Agreed. What is needed is a 5 second test for HIV that is 90% accurate and uses saliva, and is used close to 100% of the time before sex - even between married people. Since the Basic Reproduction Number of HIV is something like 2-5, this device would totally eradicate HIV eventually. Although condoms would do the same if they were used 100% of the time and reduced HIV transmission by 4/5 or more.
In the early 80s cats were dying off from an immune system destroying virus too. Yetr medicine was lucky enough discover a vaccine quickly. Its a routine pet service now. This encouraged early predictions of a quick vaccine for the human version. But no such luck.
The insurance companies do not seem to care about the overcharges and I do not know why. Two situations happened to me like that, though not on the scale of your father's. Once my wife went in to have her birth induced because she should have given birth about two weeks ago. When she went in the nurse first checked to see if she was dilated and since my wife was, they did not do any of the procedure. Later we found that the hospital had charged for the procedure anyway.
Another time when my wife was pregnant and went to the dentist for a regular visit she did not get the x-ray. The dentist still charged the insurance company for it though. In both cases we reported it to the insurance companies, but it was clear that they did not care.
The only time that any insurance company seemed to care was in this case: We called and found an anesthesiologist that was covered under our plan. So when my wife gave birth, this was the fellow that gave my wife an epidural. Well a long time later we get a bill. I call and the lady says that in fact that this doctor was never a member of our insurance so we have to pay. This was a PPO so the insurance had paid a portion and the doctor wanted more. (The PPO paid 80% of what it pays its member doctors which was not even close to what this doctor was charging.) I would have been fine, except for the fact that I had worked so hard getting everything together to find clinics whose doctors worked at a hospital that was in the plan and an anesthesiologist that was also working in that particular hospital. This was no easy feat, really that was the only combination that worked anywhere within an hour of where we lived. Now when I called the insurance they said that this doctor was not working for them and never did! This whole dispute was dragging on and in one of the later times I called the insurance company gathering information for the impending arbitration phase as I was giving the information of my case, the lady on the phone said that this doctor was in their system...
BINGO! This rung some alarm bells for this lady and she connected me with some higher-up. It turned-out that it looked like this particular doctor was playing a sort of game. He was repeatedly asking to become a member of the insurance, would be sent the paperwork, but would never fill it out. So while he was pending he was listed in the system and every 60 days or so would be removed. Then after a while he would start this process again. I was sent some paperwork that we signed that basically amounted to the insurance company would pay the bill but I would not sue the insurance company. The understanding from the conversation was that the lawyers for the insurance company would go after this doctor.
After that I never dealt with the doctor again. The threats about being reported to a collection agency stopped so I assume he got paid. Then later out of the blue I got some letter from the doctor with some lame explanation that a hospital he worked for kept putting him under this insurance as if he was trying to protect his back from a lawsuit.
The thing that always bothered me was that when dealing with the insurance company, if it had not been for the fluke that I had called while his status was pending, we would have never figured-out what was going on. Really the insurance company should have been able to immediately see that he was taking patients for 60 days at a time every few months right away instead of telling me that he is not a member doctor and never was. But I have to wonder how many people did pay the guy.
But back to the over billing, The first kid we had cost almost twice as much as the second. These were under different insurance plans and in different parts of the country so that may have something to do with it. But the second kid had many more problems. For example she was not growing properly and that meant monthly ultrasounds followed by bi-weekly. Also we had numerous cases of preterm labor that required trips to hospitals, once to a hospital that was out of network even. Because of this I expected the bill for the second one to have been much more than the first. It was not, and it just makes me wonder how many things like the inducement procedure we never had were sent to the insurance company to pay.
Diseases have no morals. While people could prevent infection by abstaining from sex, it only takes one encounter for HIV transmission to occur. According to a study by AmFAR, less than half the people in the U.S. who are HIV positive are aware of their status. Does that mean the people who are infected by someone unaware of his/her HIV status are less guilty of having HIV than those infected while regularly engaging in unprotected sex? What about women unknowingly infected by husbands who have sex with men on the DL? Misplaced moralizing is what prevented crucial research from occurring when HIV was in its infancy; finger-pointing and prioritizing levels of "innocent victims" cloud the fact that we're dealing with a virus whose only agenda is to survive and propagate. How HIV manages to propagate may be slowed by examining and altering the human behavior involved in its transmission, but the only thing that will the AIDS pandemic altogether is a cure. And not just a cure for "innocent victims," but for all the infected. The only thing served by such labels is bigotry, and bigotry only serves to hinder medical progress.
Well, I guess that's another way to put it. I agree with you that legal risk is a big part of it, especially for pharmaceutical companies doing clinical trials. But no matter how you look at it, ethics ARE a huge scientific setback. I heard about a neuroscientist once who wanted to get wires implanted in his brain and left there for a year. It's something they do to epileptics before surgery all the time, but they only leave them there for 12 hours or a couple of days. He wanted them in for a whole year, and he wanted to get access to the data afterwards. He found surgeons who were willing to implant them, lined everything else up, and in the end was unwilling to get ethical approval from the IRB (institutional review board). It might be ill-advised, but unethical? We can risk human life for manned space flight when robots would do, or send soldiers to their death for oil, but we can't risk human life to understand the brain? That's the kind of ethics I'm talking about.
The reason that drugs are cheaper in [insert non-US country here] is plain and simple that profit maximizing entities are taking advantage of 3rd-degree price discrimination.
The costs of R&D need to be recovered and that is amortized into the US prices- After that point anything down to the actual marginal cost of producing the pills (pennies) increases profits. International borders are very effective ways to segment a market, and the government does the expensive work of preventing reselling... Get it?
Monopsony in an 'information' market (drugs are nearly such, all the expense is in R&D, with marginal production being nearly free) means a lower than competative price. Additionally, other countries don't have the same demand for drugs, nor the same marginal product of labor, and hence they won't pay as much for drugs in a competative market. The point is that they don't pay enough that the drugs would ever be developed. If we lower our prices, without being able to raise theirs, then we need a new way to stimulate innovation.... In essence we are decreasing the social-losses due to the patent-monopoly, but unfortunately outside our borders.
The question of 'what is the correct level of drug reasearch' is a totally different question.
PS I don't like the current patent system, and I got my ass smacked in my graduate Industriual Org class when I tried to posit some 'better ideas.' It really isn't just a political clusterf*ck, it's a really complicated problem.... The fact remains that this is more an example of how socialized medicine, as-exists, only works because someone *else* pays for it... In this case the US pays for foreign healthcare.
Who said anything about gay sex being the main method. It used to be the main method. Now there are more women infected than men, and in the hardest hit parts of the world the spread of the epidemic is closely tied to widespread prostitution. In both cases the true factor is promiscuity, what has always been a risky factor with regards to disease but which has been lauded in popular culture for both sexes for the past 40 years or so. How many people you've had sex with is practically a metric for how manly (for men) or liberated (for women) you are these days.
I only made that statement to respond to a specific example in the prior post. I don't know the rates for the industrialized countries but I suspect that even if homosexuals still have a higher percent infected than heterosexuals, the larger numbers of heterosexuals could mean they have as many or more people actually infected - and AFAIK prostitution plays only a relatively small part in the spread of the disease here. When you look at who gets infected in America, what you mainly hear about is a lot of people who thought their partner(s) were safe and decided to skip the condom, and a bunch of people who like to fuck around but don't like condoms, and a lot of people who just can't bring themselves to make the mental and physical effort neccessary to practice safe sex. And even sex with a condom - or even without intercourse - is no guarantee.
Syphillis was indeed a major problem some years back. Not incidentally, it was at its most deadly when and where prostitution was common, in the cities in the late 1800s. Then we could cure it and aggressive tracking and treatment policies and changing social mores reduced it's significance to very little. And now we are seeing a resurgence of syphilis anyway, and AIDS is a major killer. It makes me wonder what's next. (I note in passing that it seems the more intimate the contact the more fatal the disase tends to be, but I don't have any data to back that up).
To be blunt, the idea that a social stigma and religous dogma against extramarital sex and particularly promiscuity is based purely on idealogical justifications is flat out wrong. They are almost certainly based primarily on the eminently practical notions of preventing the spread of disease and ensuring that fathers are both taking responsibility for their own children and not being tricked into doing so for others. Both of those unfortunate events can have been easily avoided with a little reason and responsibility, and yet history has shown time and again that given half the chance people will exercise neither. There is zero evidence that today is any different, and why not? Unbridled lust has always been louder than caution and reason. Ask yourself - how many times in your life have the rigid opinions of other people been the only thing stopping you from making a foolish decision? If you can't think of any, try remembering what it was like to be a teenager.
We may today regard rigid social constraints as something inimical to our pluralistic society, but cold reality is proving them to be vital components of our survival.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
From the article: The vaccine is made from a patient's own dendritic cells and HIV isolated from the patient's own blood.
Think about what that means. No mass production. A blood sample from each patient must be taken, processed, and the finished vaccine returned to that patient, without error. There is no generic serum.
Forget the patent flame-war for a minute. The production costs of this thing are prohibitive. The costs of this thing will look more like the costs of in virto fertilization procedures than they will look like a vaccine.
I'm sorry to say that this announcement is, as yet, a nice bit of research and nothing more.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
God damn it! We are too many, WAY TOO MANY, ALREADY!
Don't you understand that you are DESTROYING THIS ENTIRE
PLANET by letting those live who Nature chose should not?
Cuba's AIDS Quarantine Center Called 'Frightening'
I wonder if any of the dendrite donors is named J. D. Shapely.
Did you mount a military-grade, variable-focus MASER on an unlicensed artificial intelligence?
For a start you are assuming that all homosexual infection is irresponsible, which is just insulting.
Further you are assuming that the "other/unknown" category is irresponsible.
Further you do not take into account the likelihood that the rate of HIV reporting among gay men is likely to be far higher than among the general population, because of the historic prevalance of infection in this group.
Further you do not take into account the fact that hetrosexual transmission of HIV is increasing.
Approximately 5% of the population possess full or partial immunity to the AIDS virus, cf
2 48
http://www.sciforums.com/archive/index.php/t-38
[that's just the first google response I got to AIDS immunity "black plague"]
This is in no way a cure.
It is not even a preventive vaccine...
Learn to read, people..