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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!
Never tried it, but I do like Orange Crush...
I guess it's going to be a long weekend of explaing WTF is up with the pinapples slices in my hefeweizen.
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
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.
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.
Yeah, that's it. We're spending billions of dollars on research to find cures and not sell them. Then when patients die, we burglarize their homes during the funeral. Profit!
Look. Killing certain human cells while not killing all the rest of the cells is hard. It's a lot harder than killing a foreign pathogen without killing the human, which is already a lot harder than, say, rebooting a server or modifying a Perl script.
Also, please note that the cancer treatment here hasn't been in human trials. (The AIDS treatment has.) It hasn't even been in animals yet. Will it fail to be as promising as the hyperventilating press release makes out? There's a 99.9999% chance that it will.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
yikes. having personally seen the effects of HIV infection and AIDS in people who subscribe to the AIDS Denialist school of thought, i felt compelled to reply to this posting.
bottom line:
1. CD4+ T-lymhocyte counts and HIV viral loads have been negatively and positively (respectively) correlated with survival in virtually every patient population ever studied.
2.highly active anti-retroviral therapy (HAART) has been shown to significantly reduce mortality in HIV-infected individuals.
we practice evidence-based medicine in the united states. you can try to poke holes in the virology if you want to (i'm not a virologist) but you can't argue with epidemiology.
the theory that HIV is the causative pathogen in AIDS has not been disproven in any peer-reviewed publication that i have ever seen.
we know how to treat these patients and turn AIDS into a chronic rather than a fatal illness.
here is a more complete resource on the debate.
My reaction to the statement "eewweee it tasts yucky" is usually "why are you still here"?
Perhaps it's a fundamental flaw in news reporting and how it rarely interacts well with scientific researchers that explain your jaded state.
For a number of years, I worked in biological research, and twice I had the (dis)pleasure of interacting with reporters.
If you tell them there is an observed improvement in 15% of all cases, then it's a cure. If you tell them there is a statistical corelation, then it "causes". If you tell them about the science, they will latch onto the most trivial detail and make it the entire point of your research effort.
It's because most Science doesn't make good news. Good news (at least as it seems to be presented these days) gives the audience the aura of understanding without any actual understanding. In other words, good news asks the audience to learn almost nothing, but be entertained nonetheless.
To prove my point, cancer is the misbehavior of the patient's own cells, yet nearly everyone refers to it as an item that is "caught" like a transmittable disease, and "cured" like a bacterial infection. Non-scientists rarely differentiate between the reasons why our cells misbehave, instead they concentrate on where the misbehaving cells are located. Finally, people tend to totally ignore the effects of known carcinogens because they have been bombared with so much bad news that started off as:
When rats eat a diet of 80% fat, they have a 12% higher risk of contracting a cancer over a 3 year lifespan, 40% of those cases are self-arresting producing only benign tumors.
becomes:
Scientists find that diets high in fat significantly increase the risk of cancer. People who eat pizza, french-fries, and mayonnaise are at risk, and are 60% more likely to die. So it's time to stock up on those veggies.
No mention that it's rats, not people. No mention that it's a lifetime diet of 80% fat. No mention that it only affects 12% of the rat population studied. No mention that 60% of the affected die, leading to an increase of mortailty of only 8% or so.
Sometimes (just like in my example) they do it so badly that they have internal logical errors in their own reporting. 60% more likely to die (as opposed to 100% certainty that we will eventually die).
So be skeptical, but please don't be skeptical of the science, unless you are one of the few people who actually bother to read the publications without the mind-numbing news filter placed on top of it.
So, I guess the flu virus ain't a virus either, under the reasoning you exhibit above?
AIDS is not a virus, but "AIDS virus" simply means "the virus that causes AIDS", just as "flu virus" means "the virus that causes the flu". Of course, the actual _name_ of the "AIDS virus" is HIV.
The person writing the phrase "AIDS virus" knows what he means, as does everyone reading the phrase. There's not even anything misleading about it: AIDS referes to a syndrome which is caused by infection by HIV, and the phrase AIDS virus is just a reference to human immunodeficiency virus - nothing misleading about it. While I would prefer that someone refer to HIV as simply HIV, calling it the AIDS virus is not wrong.
"AIDS vaccine" is slightly misleading, for the reason you give, but it is also a case of everyone involved knowing precisely what is meant, and no actual confusion is likely to result.
+5 informative my arse. The above is not unlike complaining about the usage of who versus whom in some random sentence.
(This post brought to you by a lack of coffee and a distaste for grammar fascism and related disorders.)
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?
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