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.
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 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?
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)
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
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.
They are talking about dendritic cells which are a component of the immune system - not neural tissue.
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.
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
If you're really that concerned about over-population please kill yourself now. You'll be helping your own cause.
As long as it isn't you, right?
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.
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?"
You are confused on this point. Dendrites are the tree like extensions that project out from a neuron (these are not cells, but are a part of a cell). Dendritic cells (which they are using in this study) are antigen-presenting cells (APCs) from your immune system and have nothing to do with the nervous system (They are also sometimes referred to as Helper T Cells).
"When Nature Calls We All Shall Drown" Johan Edlund
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.
You are confused ...
Indeed. And I might add, hasty. to all who jumped on my several mistakes here...I deserved and other readers value the corrections.
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.
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
"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...
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
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.
AIDS does have low grade secondary transmission vectors.
No, it does not. HIV has never been shown to be transmitted by mosquitoes, and it isn't even clear how a mosquito could transmit HIV.
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.
50 times zero is still zero.
And even if you live with the misconception that HIV can be transmitted at a low rate, 50 times a very low rate is still a very low rate. If you regularly get bitten by mosquitoes, you are in serious trouble and should be taking more precautions.
If you don't have unprotected sex and don't share needles, you should be more worried about traffic accidents, falls, the flu, heart disease, cancer, and crossing the street, because one of those probably will get you.
usher in a new error of free love!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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
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!
In Africa AIDS is epidemic in the heterosexual population. It is like this no where else in the world. A possible cause is African sexual practices which include more partners in general (I consider this theory to be unlikely), and another cause is less sanitary conditions and more disease (open sores and such) which make sexually contracted AIDS far more likely. It could also be genetic suceptibility or even different AIDS varients in Africa, but there seems to be no evidence for this.
Nowhere else in the world except Africa do you have a significant chance of contracting AIDS through heterosexual sex. Figure out why this is, and you'll win a Nobel.
your comment reminded me of the following line from Fight Club:
On a long enough timeline everyone's survival rate drops to zero.
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
ERR... have you actually looked at any statistics latly? The fastest growing segment of new HIV patients is straight young Women. The largest segment are straight people. Gays numerically are a small group and they have a high infection rate, but fewer people with aids. A dozen people a year die from being stuck by lightning. A couple hundred striaght non-black people die each year of aids. I think your a few orders of magnitude off.
If you don't get laid, then you have the same chance of getting aids as beign struck by lightning. So I guess posting on slashdot is a cure?
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
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.
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.
Figure out that the heterosexual spread of AIDS is rapidly becoming true in the rest of the world, and you'll live longer...
Seriously, read the news articles that are coming out today. The spread of AIDS in the heterosexual population is not just an African thing. It may be more advanced in Africa, but it's coming to the rest of the world.
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)
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
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.
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?
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.
*zzzzzt*
Free sex for all humans!
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.
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.
It is like this no where else in the world.
That is completely false.
and another cause is less sanitary conditions and more disease (open sores and such)
"open sores"? You must be joking.
Nowhere else in the world except Africa do you have a significant chance of contracting AIDS through heterosexual sex.
You really seem to have this fixed idea that homosexual sex is somehow inherently different and that transmission through "normal" sex is nearly impossible. I am wondering where you got this idea. It is completely false and dangerous. I also can't help wondering whether you are over the age of 12.
The only difference with Central African HIV is that it is so common. It has reached truly epidemic map-clearing proportions. Ignorance and superstition definitely seem to play a part in this (ie. the virgin cure, lack of condom use, distrust in the "germ theory" as the cause of AIDS).
The bottom line is HIV is easily transmittable through heterosexual sex. The fact that it is even more easily transmittable through sodomy is actually not all that important. Either way, if you are having sex with an HIV infected partner your chances of acquiring it from even a single encounter are quite high.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Huh? What about the lack of education? I seem to recall SA had high ranking officials publicly denying that HIV leads to AIDS. There is widespread misunderstanding (and misinformation).
Random is the New Order.
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
While I've no argument with the above posts, that's not a complete picture of Merck's behaviour:
Ivermectin is also used to prevent heartworm infections in dogs. When I did the math, here's what I found: sold in pill form, the only form available for dogs, the cost at wholesale to treat 30 medium-sized dogs for one year was $1500. The exact same quantity of drug, sold as an injectable/drench for sheep, cost $2.50 at retail (and that's about 4 times the price for the same drug as formulated for cattle). Despite numerous requests, Merck refused to make an injectable/drench formulated for dogs, even tho there is no reason not to (other than "got 'em by the balls, so squeeze hard"). The price is not so bad if you've only got one pet, but it's quite expensive if you've got a kennel.
Judging by the price for the most concentrated formulalation (for cattle), ivermectin is so cheap to produce that it might as well be free; most of the cost is evidently unavoidable overhead, like bottling and shipping. So don't get too excited about Merck giving it away to treat river blindness. It makes them look good (and it was the right thing to do) but it cost them damnear nothing.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
HIV isn't very contagious. So what you need is widespread education and then (in general - there'll be exceptions of course) the stupid ones will go kill themselves off. Who knows, the next few generations might even be smarter as a result (or have better self control over their sex drives - which isn't such a bad thing if you ask me). Heck it's probably unlikely the typical Slashdotter would contract HIV ;).
:)
I'm more worried about the next killer flu pandemic. Even if the typical slashdotter doesn't leave his basement he could catch it from the pizza delivery boy!
We should ban this "shaking hands" custom and switch to the Thai-style hands-together greeting, or the Japanese-style bows.
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.
"WordNet (r) 2.0"
vaccine
n : immunogen consisting of a suspension of weakened or dead
pathogenic cells injected in order to stimulate the
production of antibodies
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.
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)