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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.
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.
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.
Seriously, curing HIV is just dealing with a symptom of a problem. If the groups that promote AIDS and STD education in Africa could get just a tiny portion of the funding that goes into HIV medical research, the spread of AIDS would run into a wall. In South Africa, they have billboards that say things like "You can catch AIDS by having sex with an infected woman." Americans think, well, no kidding, but very few people have bothered to tell the South Africans that. AIDS is a problem that has to be attacked on all fronts.
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
Erm. The same company that devloped Vioxx also devloped Ivermectin (Mectizan), a highly effective treatment plan (once every 12 months) for River blindness, a dehabilitating disease that affects people who can't afford modern medicine. Despite Merck dumping about $290 million into developing the treatment, they give it away for free.
Before you attack Merck with pitchforks and torches in hand, you ought to realise that this company has an unprecedented history of philanthropy, and it saddens me to know that somebody at that company with their eyes in profit instead of the Right Thing screwed up so royally with the debacle we know today as Vioxx.
Whatever happens with that company, I hope that at least some of their positive ideological foundations are continuted.
--sean
"[T]he single essential element on which all discoveries will be dependent is human freedom." -- Barry Goldwater
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.
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.