Slashdot Mirror
Possible Breakthroughs in Cancer and AIDS Research
FortKnox writes "Two possible medical breakthroughs have come to light in recent days. In Australia, it was discovered that pineapple extract can stimulate the body to attack cancer cells. And in Japan, Kumamoto University researchers have developed a drug that will block cells from the AIDS virus, thus making something akin to an AIDS vaccine." From the Australian news: "One of the molecules, CCZ, stimulates the body's immune system to target and kill cancer cells, the other, CCS, blocks a protein called Ras, which is defective in 30 percent of all cancers. QIMR researcher Tracey Mynott said her team had set out to find why the enzyme-rich bromelaine crush had such strong effects on biological material."
Still no cure for can...er, never mind. Well, the people over at FARK must be really disappointed. They'll have to come up with a new tagline!
From TFA:HA! I told my guidance counselor that all that beer drinkin' would pay off eventually... ^_^
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Never tried it, but I do like Orange Crush...
Time to go buy some stock in Dole!
Oh I can see it now... Healthy, Tasty Pineapple Flavored Cigarettes that have no Surgeon General's Warning.
News Reporters Make Tasty Polar Bear Treats!
Cures for a lot of diseases probably already exist but there is no money in curering people, just treating their symptoms. You really think drug companies care about your health?
"Go into the hall of mirrors and have a bloody hard look at yourself" - HG Nelson
Herbal Pineapple extract Spam in 5... 4... 3...
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
I just KNEW they were good for me!
The latest Slashdot meme.
old news
1: Planta Med. 1985 Dec;(6):538-9. Related Articles, Links Inhibition of tumour growth in vitro by bromelain, an extract of the pineapple plant (Ananas comosus). Taussig SJ, Szekerczes J, Batkin S. PMID: 4095199 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
1985.
At least it's not a dupe.
I just hope these don't fade into the background as a lot of these types of things do. i think the world is ready for some cures...
Maybe I'm getting jaded these days, but it seems that every other week we have an announcement about a revolutionary breakthrough that's going to cure all these terminal conditions. And yet, we don't really seem to see masses of cancer patients getting cured outside these laboratory studies, in the way that antibiotics swept away most bacterial illnesses. Survival rates are up, sure, but most people are still dying and these conditions are still considered more or less terminal. Are the Powers That Be simply sitting on a bunch of cures, or do these things never turn out to be as promising as they were in experimental trials?
Scientists discover new substances that offer progress in the fight against cancer and HIV.
Still no cure for bartenders who put fruit in beer.
Zonk submitted these stories to Fark many hours ago, with less-funny headlines?
...oh wait, now I understand, he has a MAGIC JOHNSON!!! I'm always the last to figure it out.
So, if the drug prevents HIV from entering cells, what's the difference between that and immunity? My guess is the virus can still enter the bloodstream...
Making a vaccine is one thing, getting it to Africa is another thing entirely. Last I read, drugs exist to treat the "Sleeping Sickness" but aren't readily available because it's not profitable to sell them to the poor Africans...
"Live as if you'll die tomorrow." Ridiculous. You could die later today.
That's such a great cover. I wonder what the "almost no" side effects are, like "all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light".
Nuke Gay Whales for Jesus.
Anyone interested in AIDS science, who wonders why HIV is so misunderstood, would do well to start here and read a bit:
http://aliveandwell.org/
http://forums.fark.com/cgi/fark/comments.pl?IDLink =1564149
Read this last night.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
He's clearly the ripe man for the job.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Well, cancer stuff is cool and all, and I know you all love to comment on anything involving fruit... but I think the AIDS blocking research is a bit more interesting, personally. Not that I have AIDS or anything, but it would certainly be nice to be rid of it, especially in Africa.
"pineapple molecules"
Pineapples have molecules of their own?
Maybe you should have read the paper: They've already done a small-scale clinical trial.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
"AIDS virus"? AIDS is not a virus
HIV - Human Immunodeficiency Virus
AIDS - Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiv
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDS
FWIW, HIV is the virus, AIDS is a descryption of a condition when your white blood cells drop below a certain level.
"Obscenity is the crutch of the inarticulate motherfucker." - cloak42
If we're going to express our support for getting this research funded do we all have to wear little paper umbrellas on our lapels?
The only acceptable defense of scientific results is to say that they were the product of the Scientific Method.
How everything will work in the actual patient...
This HIV study was a 40 patient clinical trial. Pretty damn close to actual patients if you ask me.
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
Local to St. louis here. There has been an ad on the radio about an AIDS vaccine being tested here. I was wondering if anyone else knew anything about it. The ad is for volenteers to go in to be a part of the study...you can't get AIDS from it and yadda yadda crap. Why exactly do we have fifty billion research companies all looking for the same answer and none of them are working together on it?
Bad news for Trojan good news for Hasboro.
Malaria kills about a million Africans a year, but we hear less about it and more about HIV, despite the massive funding gap for malaria. Especially since there are cheap and effective measures against malaria which are not used because of a simple lack of funding.
Hey hippies---are you happy you got DDT banned now? All those dead Africans say thank you!
But seriously, there are some moderately effective drugs, and treated mosquito nets (covered in a bug-eating fungus, apparently) have been used to great effect.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Well, I read it. If you do read it well you will see that they have not done a clinical trial. They state that it works "in patients". That means that they may as well have taken blood from these people and worked with the cells from it. Sorry, not convincing. The definition of a "clinical trial" is rather more stringent. Both of these "news" items are overenthusiastic overhyped press releases meant to help raise funds. I know as I've made such releases myself (the last one was when we found a gene involved in a rare hair disorder, we released it to the press as a "baldness gene" I spent a day in various radio studios after that).
----- One learns to itch where one can scratch.
Interesting. Thanks for clearing up that piece of medical marketing jargon. I'll have to remember it; there is way to much of that particular species of jargon in use.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
shares of Dole will skyrocket on this.
antipaucity
Again, you fail to read this properly. I do not believe for one second that a compound that has not passed beyond the letter+digit naming stage has been used in 40 patients, in the sense of systemic administration. There's no way that you can get away with this from an ethics point of view now that we have HAART. I believe it when they give actual details. Perhaps it was a phase I toxicity study. That is NOT a trial! As said in my other post, they may as well have taken material from 40 patients and tried it on that. The present message is just hype, hype, hype.
----- One learns to itch where one can scratch.
humans!
d y-had-a-simple-solution-since-day-one, i.e. quit screwing around
for most-effort-put-into-solving-a-problem-that-alrea
now for the next category, most-bodily-gases-expelled-in-a-minute, the winner is...
the Verticons!
I wonder how my imaginary girlfriend will feel about this...
>if it succeeds it will seek a commercial partner to develop a drug that could be used in human clinical trials.
What they are saying is, "Unless we find a patentable and highly profitable way to secure this discovery, We won't bother."
I welcome the return of more natural remedies. These drug companies aren't happy until they turn a natural remedy into something with side effects.
The government which is strong enough to protect you from everything is strong enough to take everything from you.
This just in: SpongeBob is celebrating quietly with Tinky Winky at his home in Bikini Bottom.
This space for rent
However, your anal objection to the phrase "AIDS virus" in completely unfounded. HIV is the virus that causes AIDS. AIDS uniquely identifies this particular virus, and so in English, the phrase "the virus that causes AIDS" can be shortened to "the AIDS virus" without any loss of meaning or correctness.
In fact, the phrase was probably intentionally chosen to intensify (or sensationalize) the mental image conveyed by the story.
...because "hacker" sounds way sexier than "code drone."
I wonder how long it will be until the world begins to wake up and realize...
You don't want to know what he pays for a pair of gloves.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Back in the day, when one wrote a NSF grant proposal to fund the isolation, identification and synthesis of natural product, one always included prominently the fact that in vitro - in a Petri dish, the desired compound killed cancer cells. Hey presto - now it's an NIH grant proposal as well. The keywords antitumor, anticancer, etc. in the title were magic.
Of course, these never became actual medicines. One realized over time that a sledgehammer will kill cancer cells in a Petri dish. As will a stick of dynamite or a teaspoonful of sodium cyanide or just driving over it with a Buick.
Once you take into account that human biological system is slightly more complex than the Petri dish system, you will be less excited by the breathless prose of headline writers.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Well, only those that travel to Malaria-infested parts of the world do.
Rich White Americans DO get HIV. Expecially those with multiple sex partners.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
As a biomedical researcher who has worked on cancer mechanisms in the past, I speak with some authority: these "breakthroughs" are a load of hooey. The popular press really loves it when some dinky little research group at Bumblefuck U. discovers a modest effect on cancer cells, HIV, etc. by some commonplace natural molecule. We've heard it about pineapples, green tea, broccoli, red wine, you name it. Usually these studies are conducted under extremely artificial conditions using tiny sample sizes and ambiguous assays. To be cynical, if researchers want to get a positive result, they can usually contrive some experimental condition where they'll observe said result. I read Slashdot for interesting technology items but I have been very disappointed with the caliber of the biomedical coverage. There have been a number of stunning discoveries over the last few years (two that leap to mind are microRNA-mediated viral immunity and gene regulation or epigenetic memory in plants) that never made it to Slashdot because they require more than a high school level education in biology to appreciate. Evidently, mod points don't go to people with an advanced knowledge of biology. How would you feel if all of tech stories were press releases from Microsoft?
I'm starting on the pineapple colored wristbands. Only a dollar to support pineapple research.
Well this sucks, I HATE pineapples! any chance of a pill form?
Free electronics!
Work with the gist of the story. Its like the guy in CS class complaining the professor didn't put a semicolon on the blackboard pseudocode.
Safety is a real problem. Lots of things kill cancer cells or have other useful medical properties. The problem is that too many of them also screw up other cells or bodily processes. Rapidly dividing cells, such as those in the digestive system and hair follicles are often hosed by cancer drugs (hence the nausea and hairlessness of cancer treatment patients). I'd also worry that anything that accelerates immune function leaves the patient prone to autoimmune diseases. Sure, I'd rather not die of cancer, but if it means I get MS, rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes, hypothyroidism, etc., then I (and the FDA) might think twice about approving the drug or really calling it "a cure."
Only about 1 in 5000 drugs gets approved (and I'd bet that all 4999 rejects started out promising). And only 1 in 3 approved drugs makes money for the company (i.e., is actually used to treat the number of patients that the company expected).
I truly wish them the best of luck in finding new treatments for cancer, but I also recognize that the odds are stacked against the new drugs.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
And there's a cure for ebola, measles, smallpox ... abstinence from society. Total abstinence. That'll knock 'em dead.
There's a cure for auto accidents, too, called the M1 Abrams tank. Mileage sucks, maintenance sucks, cost sucks, but by god, if we only let those people drive who could afford Abrams, why, we'd cut deaths from auto accidents down to almost zero.
Or maybe you'd prefer banning automobiles altogether. Yeh, that'd stop auto accidents. Yeh.
Get real. Expecting humans to abstain from sex except with their spouse is about as real as expecting people to stop speeding on the honor system. Especially when the number of people with AIDS in the US is around one million; one in 300. And with the incubation period being on the order of ten years, it sure isn't on people's minds all the time, especially when they get drunk or just plain feel good. Are you going to ban alcohol and feeling good too?
It's real nice to spout platitudes about morality and abstinence being the only known cure, but it isn't a known cure because it doesn't stop transfusions or needle sharing spreading AIDs, and there are far more practical methods like using condoms. Are you part of the crowd that turns your nose up at recommending condoms to stop AIDs because it encourages amoral sex outside marriage? Must be nice to not have shit that stinks.
Better to have a solution, condoms, which is widely used, even if it is only 95% effective, than some psuedo cure, alleged to be 100% effective, which is unusable in practice.
Perfect is the enemy of good enough. Moral twerps have their heads up their asses.
Infuriate left and right
In Russia there is a serie of books by Mark Zholondz.
:-)
About cancer, he tooks a number of biology books, counts forces of immune system, and even in ideal scenario, where immune system is not required to deal with diseases, poisons of outer environment, nor old and dead cells of our body - even then immune system would have enough soldiers to defeat only 33% of cancer cells. So there is another enti-cancer system in our bodies.
Perdon my English.
I wonder if some medical student with good knowledge of russian was interested to translate those broshures to English
Um... no. see below:
0 05 0.htm%5D
New drug blocks HIV from entering human cells
http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_1423753,
">Indo-Asian News Service
Tokyo, July 7, 2005
"A new drug that blocks HIV virus from entering human cells and causes almost no side effects has been developed by Japanese researchers.
The drug, code named AK602, was tried on 40 AIDS patients in the US and almost no side effect was found.
"When patients took 0.02 ounces of AK602 twice a day for 10 days the HIV dropped to an average of one per cent, according to a research team led by Hiroaki Mitsuya of Kumamoto University.
"Current AIDS medications often lose their effectiveness after a few days due to the virus' resistance, but the AK602 reacts to human cells instead of attacking the virus, said Mitsuya. [...]"
Under current HAART treatment, it takes months for HIV viral load to go down that quickly, and side effects under current meds are not negligible (high cholesterol, weird fat distribution, major depression, intense diarrhoea...)
***Foucault is watching you..***
Let the summer of love commence!
"C++ is to C as Lung Cancer is to Lung"
The supplement people advertise it as good for digestion rather than as a substance which helps fight cancer though.
It's interesting how much scientific evidence there is now for the medical effects of what are basically just food supplements. I started looking into this stuff when my finger joints began aching after 10 years worth of typing for 8 hours a day. (Sorted BTW)
e.g. The following all have scientific studies backing up the claims.
Glucosamine and chondroitin helps fight arthiritis, there's animal research showing that they may also help with sports injuries to joints.
Omega 3 oils significantly reduce the risk of heart attacks. They also help significantly with brain function; memory, concentration. They also help with joint suppleness and skin health. (Cod liver oil, fish oil, flax seed oil)
St Johns Wort contains a mood enhancing compound which has a significant effect on minor depression. As effective as stuff like Prozac, with fewer side effects.
Lycopene, from red fruit like tomatoes helps prevent prostate cancer.
There's a load more. This isn't to say that all health foods/supplement claims are valid and if you have a problem you should see your doctor, but the saying "you are what you eat" certainly appears to be true.
Deleted
in Japan, Kumamoto University researchers have developed a drug that will block cells from the AIDS virus, thus making something akin to an AIDS vaccine.
:
Ok, first of all, an *HIV* vaccine (AIDS is a syndrome, not a virus) is NOT akin to what they are talking about here. Although the article is woefully unsourced, the drug they are talking about is probably what they call a Fusion inhibitor. It basically keeps the virus particles on an HIV viron from interacting with the CCR5 receptor on the outside of a macrophage cell. Normally a HIV viron would be able to shut down the cells functioning by attaching to the CCR5 and thus gain an easy target to penetrate and infect.
This drug class, while becoming more popular and good for those extremely drug resistant who are being treated with anti-retroviral meds, is not going to do anything but supress the virus a bit in it's current state in an already infected person. Once infected, you always have HIV. Fact. HIV has far to many ways to attack the body (cell-to-cell mediation, inducing an autoimmune response, etc). There is also no big trials mentioned. I'd like to know what stage theirs is in, but 40 people is NOT a big test group. It takes a much bigger one to test a drug, and even then, 'AIDS miricle drugs' don't have a great history (see AIDSVAX).
Finally, an excellent article to read on everything HIV/AIDS is Wikipedia's AIDS article. Educate yourselves, please people. If I hear one more person afraid to pick up gum cause they think 'they'll get the AIDS', i'm gonna seriously wreck up the place.
--
Check out the Uncyclopedia.org
The only wiki source for politically incorrect non-information about things like Kitten Huffing and Pong! the Movie !
Please allow me to hate the creator of the 120-character limit: *HATES*. Thank you.
Well, that's why I think it's very meaningful that this research came not from big Pharma but from a University in Japan...
More probability that people would have different motives for conducting the research. When you have a mechanism that is published in an academic journal, it may make it more difficult to obtain a patent on the mechanism itself, i'd suspect, rather than on the delivery vehicle.
***Foucault is watching you..***
I thought I was going to have to get circumcised.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
From dictionary.com:
Abstinence isn't a cure, abstinence is a form of prevention. If abstinence was a cure all you would have to do if you got AIDS is not have sex for a period of time.
The only thing abstinence cures is a marriage. If neither partner has ever had sex before, especially with each other, then it's a shot in the dark as to weather or not they will have a healthy sex life once they are married. What if one loves sex and the other doesn't? What if one person thinks the other is horrible in the sack? The quickest route to divorce is a bad sex life. There's no way in hell I'd ever consider getting married before having sex with the women unless she was either rich (in which case if it didn't work, I'd get half her dough) or she was otherwise the perfect women in every way. Drop dead gorgeous, funny, smart, healthy, in good spirits almost 100% of the time, employed, energetic, willing to cook and clean if I handle the yard work, willing to be the primary caretaker if she wants children, willing to put up with all of my bullshit, willing to not complain that I spend "too much time with the guys", willing not to complain if she feels that "I never take her with me when I go out with the guys", willing to leave me along when I'm watching the game ... aka ... a women that doesn't exist.
So in closing, you enjoy your abstinence and your either failed or unhappy marriange when you realize you don't click with your wife sexually, meanwhile I'll be chasing tail and really having a good time and when I finally do settle down and get married it'll either be a long and happy one or I'll come out of it rich.
I don't think that's the method they used in the studies, but if it works for you, fine.
And you must have a huge pair of hefeweizen.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
when a certain lab releases it's groundbreaking work on literally raising temperature inside human cells to destroy cancerous cells, while non-cancerous cells survive quite nicely.
I was at a talk about this a month ago, and we're talking about 50 percent of all cancers.
Now, as to how one delivers the temperature, that's actually not as hard as it sounds.
You heard it here first.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I don't know how popular those pineapple suppositories are going to be.....
There have been others immune found, and they are being studied. Been known about for many years, apparently started as an urban legend in the new york gay scene but was found to be true.
Read reviews of shopping cart software
Maybe if you studied how biological research is done, you'd realize how easy it would be to test it. There's things called randomized clinical trials and epidemiological studies that would easily determine in a few years time whether or these things worked. But since you can't think of it, it can't be done! Whooo-hooo!
Perhaps asking for volunteers in Africa (very high AIDS rate) might work though... if a noticable decrease occurred in the test area you've got a winner...
Wow, are you in high school? Get a clue and take class on statistics or clinical trials in particular. You'll find well agreed upon methods that work!
I'm going to go buy some of the pineapple extract (bromelain) tonight and start taking it daily.
I have a bad case of melanoma (stage 4), and while there's still some hope in traditional treatments and clinical trials, I need every advantage I can get. If bromelain slows the growth of the tumors even a little, it's a huge help in combination with the other things I'm taking. And if it doesn't help, it probably won't do any harm. It's just natural pineapple extract, and it's been consumed for years.
I'm taking artemisinin (sweet wormwood extract) for similar reasons, though I do have to be careful with my dose of that because it's somewhat hard on the liver. I'm also waiting for an order of Vitamin B17 (amygdalin/laetrile) to arrive. The latter was somewhat hard to track down because of a stink the FDA raised about it a few years ago.
Dietary supplements alone won't cure me, but they just might help, and as such it would be ridiculous for me not to try them.
-John
As a biomedical scientist working in the field of HIV and immunology research in the past 15 years (having published over 40 papers in journals like Nature, Science) I fully and completely agree with Yeasbeast's comment. Where are the peer reviewed papers on these "major breakthroughs"?? If there was really a true breakthrough in either HIV or cancer research it would make it headline in Nature, Science or Cell, sorry to say /. headline only enhances these pure BS hype, because most don't quite understand the nature of biological research and discovery.
There's a town in northern italy where a significant number of people are now immune... the immunity is a great chat-up line :)
Evolution in action!
She let me taste that sugar whole and I wanted more
Great concept, pineapple juice.
Hey hippies---are you happy you got DDT banned now? All those dead Africans say thank you!
Got news for you - it isn't banned. Check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDTwikipedia, and you'll find that it is definitely in use in Africa, and other tropical areas "where mosquito-borne malaria and typhus are greater health problems than DDT's potential toxicity."
Try checking your facts before you start calling names, would you?
Strike while the irony is hot! -- The Freethinker
And start buying Dole stock!
I know this may be sort of thick of me, but does immunity also imply that you won't carry it?
They are not exactly neocons. Neocons are the people who want to abandon the traditional conservative stance of isolationism. Old-school Republicans would have opposed the war in Iraq/Afghanistan. Note World War I, and the isolationist sentiment before WW2. Both were generated by the Republicans. Neocons like Cheney and Rumsfeld turn that on its head and say, yes we should intervene in other places. Hence, we have the "war on terror". The neocons don't particularly care about social issues. What you're referring to are the Christian fundamentalists, like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. They are the ones who believe the Bible is God's word, we should have prayer in schools, etc. They also claim that abstinence is the only foolproof cure to STD's, which is technically true, but they ignore the fact that abstinence is almost possible to realize. They care a lot about domestic social policy, but not foreign policy. Bush happens to be in both categories, however, as we can see by his fundamentalist leanings and his neocon advisors (Cheney/Rumsfeld).
I've been following for some time an oncolytic (viral) treatment that targets the RAS pathway, which is referenced in this article. The human reovirus targets cells with a disrupted RAS pathway, infecting and killing them.
Some great pictures can be seen here
The "CCZ molecule", states the article, "blocks a protein called Ras, which is defective in 30 percent of all cancers."
So there's a little bit of precedent, here.
The cure for cancer is coming: Reovirus
Back when they were first discovered (1990s), these symptomless carriers seemed like they could have been the genesis of a separate species. Children that they had with other symptomless carriers would have HIV and only be able to have survivable offspring with other symptomless carriers. Given time we'd have separate gene pools.
Around 2000 or so, they figured out how HIV- children could be born to HIV+ mothers. So there won't be any separation of the gene pool. Due to sexual recombination, if there are no disadvantages to this adaptation (like sickle cell anemia), then the gene may quickly spread throughout the species. Quickly meaning hundreds of thousands of years rather than hundreds of millions.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Specifically Lentinula Edodes (Shitaki), some Pleurotus species including P. Ostreatus (oyster), Grifola frondosa (which has strong anti HIV properties as well), Hericium erinaceous and many others have been shown to have medicinal properties including anti cancer - anti-tumour, and anti-colesterol. Not all species are effective for all ailments of course. Some of these mushrooms are available in the supermarket.
If you cannot buy them it is feasible to grow them... They make nice pets. They don't bark - they don't bite people - you don't need to take them for a walk and you sure don't need to clean up after them. Also - they only need to be fed once.
There is good information on the net and seminars are available.
I knew someone great who had had AIDS for twenty years without ever getting medication for it, who died of cancer three months ago.
To top it off, he died because the doctors didn't believe that he had a growing lump in his neck. They said they didn't have the funding to check such arbitrary nonsense (we have public health insurance in Denmark).
It's an industry that's used to short-lived cash cows. It will cope.
Me (Blog)
No, American drug prices are high because you have a "free market" that is anything but. I never even realised that that's the excuse you were given by your government; it's nonsense. Many drugs are developed in the US, many in Europe, many in Asia.
Me (Blog)
So individual choices might have more of an effect than you think. I remember an interview with an industry exec where he explained that his children (I think) had cystic fibrosis, and that gave him perspective that inspired him to push for new and better drugs.
People keep cynically pointing out that you can make more money by simply treating symptoms rather than curing a disease, but that is a simplistic model that doesn't take into account a free market.
Suppose you make AIDS maintenance medications that keep people alive. Your lead researcher comes to you and says that he has discovered a medication that may cure AIDS completely. Do you research it? Hell yes, because if you don't your competition eventually will. And while the market might dry up for AIDS treatment, there is money to be made in the cure. Anyone who doesn't keep up with the market WILL wither and die. Just look at what happened to buggy makers, or what is currently happening with the **AA companies.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Precisely. Ever notice how some sort of marriage ceremony seems to be engrained in many otherwise distinct cultures? It leads me to suspect that what people like to call "sexual morality" is really just a survival trait that evolved as a result of natural selection. Recent research on sexual networks (example) seems to point to the same conclusion.
Curent HIV vaccines rely on the fact that people seem to suffer no ill effects of not having this receptor and are currently a main focus of vaccine research.
..........FULL STOP.
Many countries threaten to invalidate the patents for drugs held by US companies unless the companies sell the drugs at slightly above incremental cost. These countries - that's you, Canada, Germany, France, et. al. - are engaging in extortion.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
A much bigger story this week is the striking result of a clinical trial of male circumcision. Apparently circumcised men have a 70% lower risk of contracting HIV than uncircumcised men (see here). Though others have shown this anecdotally, proof in a large clinical trial could revolutionize HIV prevention -- particularly in sub-Saharan countries where HIV incidence is high and male circumcision is currently rare.
A word of caution: anything one puts in one's body can conceivably be either beneficial or detrimental. People have far too strong a tendency to believe that anything plant-based or "natural" cannot harm them.
You in particular sound like you've done your homework on the things you're taking, but I get nervous at the hordes of people who fill themselves with many plant-based drugs thinking they have nowhere to go but up.
Good luck with your struggle with melanoma; that's a rough lot.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
Don't think "how good it would be", just open a site like /. and put bioresearch news, use RSS, tell everybody you opened this site, ... Maybe it's interesting enought to become an important site (I hope so).
Or, taking a little money away from the shareholder, who now tragicly won't be able to buy a new Merc this season, to prevent people from DYING. A sufficiently unjust law is no law at all (tho most non-generic drugs are sold with considerable profit in Europe anyway, you know; just not as much profit.)
Me (Blog)
Naturally occuring != homeopathic
You're quite right about tumeric, etc, but they're effective in strong doses.
To make a homeopathic preparation of tumeric you put a drop of tumeric solution in a swimming pool full of water. Then you let it dissolve, and take ten drops from that swimming pool and put it ten other swimming pools full of water. Then you bottle the water from those ten swimming pools and sell it as 'homeopathic medicine'.
If you believe (as in blind faith) in this technique, by diluting the molecules you're imparting the cosmic energy of tumeric onto the water and it's amplified by the dilution. You'll have trouble finding good studies on this in PubMed.
The best part is, thanks to the hydrological cycle, every drop of water on earth is, by now, a preparation of every kind of homeopathic medicine known to man.
So, grab a glass of tap water and slug it back. It's at least known to cure dehydration.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The reason I mention the simple solution is that I would prefer to see the money going to cure other issues that aren't behavior related. Certainly the various birth defects, alzhemier (sp?), etc... are better places to research as a behavior change won't solve them. I
Sure those birth defects are related to sexual behavior, if sex weren't involved then those births wouldn't happen more than likely. I've only heard of one case where a lady got pregnant without having sex, and that was during the US Civil War when a man got shot in the balls and the shot passed through and hit a lady, she ended up pregnant.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Imagine the peace the world would have if they would do that and legalize marijuana... for medicinal purposes of course
Legalize hemp altogether! The only reason it was made illegal via the Marijuana Tax Act in 1937 was because it posed a threat to some wealthy and powerful individuals. But even during WWII the governmemt encouraged farmers to grow hemp, making the movie Hemp For Victory to show them. Hemp is one of most if not the most industrially versatile plants there is. Hemp can be used to make things from cloths to rope to vehicles and can power the vehicle even. Rudolph Diesel designed his diesel engine to run on vegetable oil including oil made from hemp. Henry Ford, on his Iron Mountain Estate built a car that used plastic made from hemp and was powered by methanol he made from hemp. Thomas Jefferson wrote the first and second draft of the Declaration of Independence on Dutch Hemp paper.
FalconShould there be a Law?
According to this story [chinadaily.com.cn] (previously reported on slashdot), two women in China were found to be immune to AIDS. Why don't we just study what's different about these two chicks and mimick that!?!?! We already have the human genome mapped out, it can't be that hard for the proper gene therapists to replicate.
Actually there is some research going on like this. Some prostitues in Africa, Nairobi, Kenya , were found to have an immunity to aids so a vaccine was developed and was being tested. This story is almost 4 years old so I don't know if anything came from it.
FalconShould there be a Law?
A tragic aside -- in the late 90's, there were several studies of prostitutes in Kenya who did not become HIV+ despite huge numbers of exposures. Some then took a break from prostitution, headed back to their rural homes, etc. but eventually wound up prostituting themselves again. After the break, several became HIV+, showing how tenuous "protection" can be (see here [jci.org].
CNN has an article on these, The search for an AIDS vaccine, 20 years on
FalconShould there be a Law?
I guess it's going to be a long weekend of explaing WTF is up with the pinapples slices in my hefeweizen.
If you brew maybe you can do what I think I'll try, adding some pinapple to your mash. I like how the Dutch brew using different fruits like strawberries and such and have wanted to try it myself. Now I've got a good reason to try pineapple.
Heading off to the Brew Shop
FalconShould there be a Law?
hefeveizen, to my knowledge, is a very yummy wheat beer (as opposed to barley).
I prefer a good red beer made with crystal barley, especially if I brew it, though it's been too long since I had a good weisenbeir (sic).
FalconShould there be a Law?
How many Americans know how to type special characters on an American keyboard? I know I don't recall how so I ended up finding a webpage that tells how then saved it. I think I'll be finding it even harder next year as I hope to be taking a class in Portugese. Then again maybe with practice I'll get better.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Oh great, does this mean Gays can fuck eachother and not worry about AIDS?
It's not a matter of morality, it's a matter of self preservation. ...marriage ceremony seems to be engrained in many otherwise distinct cultures?..."sexual morality" is really just a survival trait that evolved as a result of natural selection.
I agree with you, however, promiscuity, unfaithfulness and even rape may also increase fecundity, creating a mating advantage, to some extent. So sexual "immorality" may also be a trait that evolved from natural selection.