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Crocodile's Immune System Kills HIV
ASEville writes "In an ongoing effort to stop the spread of HIV, scientists in Australia have discovered that crocodiles can fight off HIV and kill the virus. This is a major boon to medicine because the crocodile serum can also fight things that are penicillin resistant such as staphylococcus aureus."
"If you take a test tube of HIV and add crocodile serum it will have a greater effect than human serum. It can kill a much greater number of HIV viral organisms,"
/. editors don't read the articles submitted all the way to the end, so here's a bit towards the end that really matters:
Ummm.... So? The same thing can be said of chlorine bleach.
There are lots of known chemicals that kill HIV. The trick is finding one that leaves the patient alive. I know the
"However, the crocodile's immune system may be too powerful for humans and may need to be synthesized for human consumption."
There is nothing in the article to suggest that they have isolated the specific component that kills HIV, let alone determined that it is safe for human injection.
-Chris
-- This sig is only a test. If this were a real sig it would say something witty. --
so crocs heal up a ton faster than humans. okay.
their immune systems react much faster.
even if we use croc blood now, doesn't that mean the next strain of foo will be stronger and work regardless?
choice quote from TFA: '"The crocodile has an immune system which attaches to bacteria and tears it apart and it explodes. It's like putting a gun to the head of the bacteria and pulling the trigger," he said.'
Along from the research being misrepresented in the headline (it appears that Croc immunoglobulin is more effective at killing HIV, not that it's 100% effective or is a cure of sorts), you've gotta wonder about this:
"Darwin's Crocodylus Park, a tourism park and research center."
--Tourism park and research center?? Maby things are backwards down there, but usually research centers are associated with large academic institutions..
...or synthesize it... ...or, even if that wasn't possible, take advantage of the fact that you can draw a lot of blood from an animal without killing it...
! SITUATION! Your mom works as a paramedic saving people's lives. One night she rolls up on a multiple vehicle accident. A young girl, who is infected is trapped, your own mother, who is trying to help, cuts her arm while the blood of the girl is everywhere, so your mom gets infected, I guess with your attitude your mom just deserved it. Who is to blame though your mom or the INNOCENT girl's mom? You have a very perturbed view of this subject and should keep your mouth shut... and this is a very possible situation that could and probably has happened.
... How many people read an article like this, run off, and lick a whore? Noone ever pays attention to the details of a story and investigate what exactly is going on. The other day there was an article in a magazine about how Classic support would be dropped in the x86 Macs, and someone was talking about how all the old programs for the mac wouldn't work, and was telling everybody about how if you buy a mac today, it will be obsolete in 2006. He didn't have a clue what he was talking about, and I couldn't correct him. I see this type of ignorance all the time. People should just start flipping coins, and then picking what they want heads or tails to stand for when it hits the ground, and just do it. So much stupidity in the air, and so little true intelligence. I'm gonna go lick a dirty whore now, and get HIV. I'll then go to my doctor and tell him to inject me with alligator sperm to make it all better. Then I'm gonna get shot in the ghetto, and goto the police department and tell them to just use forensics like on TV to catch the person. People are so blinded now days.
Sig: I stole this sig.
Why aren't we all HIV positive yet? The disease is still very confined. Back in the 1980s AIDS was going to break out "real soon now". 20 years on the only time AIDS deaths increase is when a new disease is reclassified as AIDS related & we start looking for HIV in conjunction with it...
Education, Condoms, Blood testing. One of the reasons that AIDS hasn't exploded in the West is that people headed the warnings and started using Condoms. There are programmes with drug addicts to ensure they get clean needles, education of teenagers in using condoms etc etc
Why is the disease profile so very different in third world countries?
First culprit has to be the wonderful folks in the Vatican who forbid the use of Condoms and have a large degree of control in the 3rd World. The US Goverment is beginning to match the Vatican by trying to promote celibacy as a primary driver rather than tackling the problem in situ with a piece of latex.
Second up of course is plain poverty and lack of education.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
I guess we can be pedantic and say that antibiotics and antivirals are not similar things, but as far as the patient is concerned they are.
It's not being pedantic though. We want to know what this does. Explaining how it deals with bacteria doesn't tell us a lot about how it deals with a virus.
This is a technical site, with a lot of scientists. Even though the majority of readers specialise in Engineering and physics, there are quite a number of biologists, and many who have at least some education in biology. I last studied biology when I was 16, but I know in general terms the difference between a virus and bacteria.
it is better to let nature take its course.
I will remember this when you come into my emergency room, shall I? You are mortal too. You just haven't realized it yet.
What about the dead haemophiliacs? What about the medical staff that have an accidental needle stick? And of course what about the children born into this world with HIV?
If we follow your argument then we all deserve to die because everyone is guilty of something. Even you. When you have your heart attack I will just hold the tPA (aka "clot buster") in my hand and remind you how harsh the world is, and let you die, shall I?
We have a duty to do everything we can to improve the lot of our fellow man - because one day we are the ones who will need all the help we can get. You reap what you sow.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Seriously it's been known for a long time that crocs have an awsome immune system capable of killing pretty much any bacteria including the modern penicilin-resistant human-killing ones. So it probably wasnt such a longshot...
I guess with your attitude your mom just deserved it.
Not only that, but even in the case of IV drug use or promiscuity, no one deserves to die for making one stupid mistake and thinking it wasn't going to happen to them, if that death can be prevented in any way. And nowadays it CAN be prevented.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Huh? yuppie flu is just a fancy name for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Following your google search link, the first real site it found was wrongdiagnosis.com and this is what it has to say about CFS. It then goes on to advise taking steps to treat the symptoms of CFS as a way of improving life.
Acyclovir (brand name Zovirax) is used to treat herpes infections.
So you're trying to tell us that you were cured of a disease that as no known effective treatment by a herpes cream? Perhaps your GP just recognized that a regular dose of "placebo effect" can be very effective when treating psychosomatic based illnesses.
How the hell is it promising ? HIV is a virus not a bacteria, antibiotics won't do shit against it. You need to kill CD4+ cells that harbor the virus but guess what Sherlock, they die in abot 1.5 days after infection anyway. And even if you figure out how to kill the cells you still don't know which ones to kill because memory T cell contain HIV in latent state ! Bwahahaha ! You better hope you got d32 mutation in your CCR5 receptors because crocodile 'serum' is a crock of shit
Look Stonehenge. The point, and reason it's promising, is that -somehow- the crocodile is able to fend off this virus. A complex biological system more similar to us than "chlorine bleach" (as some other erudite poster mentioned) can destroy this. I don't see what the problem is in understanding this. No, we're not marketing some immunoglobulin or antiviral yet, but how can this not be an important discovery? Most antibiotics/drugs come from plants or molds afterall.
Psychosomatic illnesses are related to the interaction of body and mind and are caused or aggravated by mental factors such as internal conflict or stress.
If your brothers girlfriend was treated using uppers and downers, which change the way the mind functions by changing brain chemistry, then isn't that by definition a psychosomatic illness? Sounds like it to me.
The answer to your lack of understanding is going to school and learning how things actually work. Not constructing theories about it because you watched a program on the Discovery channel. I mean this in a constructive way, because what you are saying is not related to reality at all and that is worrying. "Some kind of internal problem" means you are not really qualified to speak on the subject in an authoritative manner, really. There is nothing wrong in admitting you don't know something. There's a vast amount of stuff I don't know. Disease is something I am an expert on, though. It goes with the job, really.
First, it's asbestos, not azbestos. Second, asbestos has been linked to mesothelioma, not lung cancer. Asbestosis in the lung is no fun at all, but you don't get lung cancer. The mesothelioma is a cancer of the pleura, a membrane that is next to the lung, not the lung itself. Third, asbetos is an irritant that your lung cannot get rid of. This constant source of irritation causes the release of chemicals by nearby cells called growth factors. The constant local exposure to growth factors is one of the things that "takes off the brakes" in the cell cycle, and this, combined with mutations, causes the start of the cancer. Not everyone exposed to asbestos will get cancer from it. You need to have the initiation step (the mutation) as well as the promotion step (the exposure to growth factors). Fourth, this has absolutely nothing to do with HIV and AIDS.
Now to address the other part of your argument.
The HIV virus is an RNA virus. This RNA is changed to DNA by an enzyme called reverse transcriptase, that comes with the virus. This DNA can and IS merged with our own DNA. It becomes a fundamental part of you. When it's like this, there is no way I can get rid of it without killing the cell.
Some infected cells start to produce copies of the virus, and they eventually die. Other "healthy" cells are infected with the virus DNA, but those genes are not currently expressed. We're still not sure what causes a cell to suddenly switch the virus production switch to "on", and when we know this we will be one step closer to curing this disease. Still other cells (the macrophages) are capable of being infected by the HIV virus, and producing a limited amount of copies of this virus. The macrophages are not normally wiped out by this, but all you need is one copy of the virus to re-infect the whole T helper cell colony again.
So we have: 1) cells that die quickly 2) cells that take a long time to get sick and die and 3) cells than never die from the disease, but are capable of re-infecting you at any time.
This explains why HIV is a chronic infection, unlike the common cold, or viruses that cause diarrhoea which are SO aggressive they basically kill ALL the cells within days, and run out of hosts. With HIV, you create new, healthy hosts a lot quicker than the infection can kill them. But these hosts are getting constantly infected. Eventually the amount of infected cells and virus production is so great that cells are infected and die the moment they are produced or become active. This is when you get AIDS because the immune system is now collapsing.
You may not know how HIV works, but we certainly do. Billions of dollars of research money were NOT wasted. In the 1980's we knew almost nothing about how any virus worked. But with HIV there's not much that can be done about it BECAUSE of the way it works. Maybe one day we will find a better way of attacking the virus directly before it gets into the cells. We're not there yet though.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
"why is research only valid if it comes from an academic institution?"
I am not sure either how this thought process became so prevalent in the US. It seems that unless you are backed by or hold some sort of certificate of authority from an academic institution, you don't get a chance or the work you do is dismissed as untrustworthy. That is true these days on so many levels, it's scary. Even when you have a hard and fast track record of out-performing academically backed or educated institutions or individuals, the performance is dismissed by many. Is it because those who are 'attached' are threatened in some way? Is it so hard to believe that people and institutions can succeed and think and prosper without the assistance or help of academia? We as a society are severely hobbling our progress by doing this. Many of our greatest thinkers and inventors and scientists in this country (and the world) were actually non-degreed or had immense difficulty and or failures with the academic systems. An academic education or academic backing is simply there to provide an extra step toward success, nothing more. Lack of it is not an indicator of not having the ability to be successful at all. Far, far too many people seem to look at it in the reverse light that it was never intended to be viewed.
BTW- If you think this is a rant by a non-degreed individual, non-post graduate individual, you are wrong. I do hold a degree(s), in the field in which I work, and I feel that it has little or no bearing on my ability to perform my tasks successfully. I work with people every day who have a higher level of education or the same level from a more prestigious institution than I, and I find many of them, well, quite frankly, stupid. I also find many of the people who have succeeded, without the help or backing of academic institutions have a greater demonstrated ability to harness the information presented to them and make efficient use of it. They had to get where they are.
Excuse me?! MARKET?
If you find the fucking cure for AIDS you'd best not be trying to fucking profit from it.
Right. You better run and go tell the pharmaceutical companies and all the scientist pouring millions of dollars are years of research into this quickly. I am sure they would hate to spend millions of dollars and years of their lives only be told fuck you when they finally develop a cure. If your asinine knee jerk opinion ruled policy, research into new medicines would grind to a halt as scientist and investors go find something better to do with their time.
So, here is an alternative idea. Instead of complaining when someone develops something useful and doesn't give away years of their life's work and millions of dollars of investments away, how about you quit bitching, open your wallet, and donate to a charity that will buy the drug for people who can't afford it.
If you don't like it, get your own PhD and millions of dollars and go find a cure yourself.
"People who are foolish enough to have unprotected sex... [deserve to die]"
The argument makes little sense. If it wasn't for STDs, it wouldn't be 'foolish' to have unprotected sex in the first place (assuming some form of oral contraception is used).
Hello, can the posters of slashdot please read the friggin article before headlining falsely??
""If you take a test tube of HIV and add crocodile serum it will have a greater effect than human serum. It can kill a much greater number of HIV viral organisms," "
That does not say KILL the HIV virus. Sensationalism is best left to FOX news, not Slashdot.
BROOKLYN
The scientists may answer with 100,000, but the marketers (or should that be 'marketeers'?) would answer, "We don't want to cure anyone - we want to treat the symptoms for life." There's a lot more money in life-long dependence on drugs than any cure. Sad, but true.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
If something from a Crocodile can teach us how to cure AIDS in humans, what about all the endangered or extinct species? Maybe this will bring some more attention to the fact that we NEED other species around to learn from and co-habitate with. It would really suck if we killed off some kind of plant that was going to hold the key to solving a horrible disease of the future.
The research for the CURRENT aids cocktail has been done. And the money being made from that product is paying for future development on better cocktails and cures.
This is basic business. Current product pays for future development.
As for finding a cure, it would be a great humaitarian achievement that would be massively hyped. It would also make a lot of money as there are MANY people who aren't getting the cocktail now. Someone would pay, possibly even Bill Gates.
Of course, any siezure of property has to be (1) in the public interest, and (2) fairly compensated. I know I'd happily support a politician who advocated such an action, regardless of how much money it might cost.
Congratulations: that's the stupidest thing I've read on Slashdot today. Why do you want to kill millions by demonstrating to HIV and cancer drug researchers that you're going to steal their work?
Your conditions are even worse:
1) It's almost never in the public interest to prove that you're willing to remove the incentive for creating new things.
2) Fairly compensating someone for what you stole from them is inherently impossible. Either you pay full market value (which gives you a net gain of zero for the "public interest"), or you pay them less than it's worth (which is hardly fair, is it?).
I am not a huge Ayn Rand fan, but you owe it to yourself to read "Atlas Shrugged" if for no other reason than to see what motivates industry. Hint: it isn't the idea of having government confiscate the work on which you've spent billions of dollars.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
"Psychosomatic" is often a term thrown around by doctors unwilling to admit that they can't figure out why the patient is sick. As far as uppers and downers only changing brain chemistry, that's only viewing the direct effects. Brain controls body. Anyone who's ever used speed can tell you that, while the drug only affects the mind, the mind definitely affects the body. Really, the distinction between brain and body can't be made very easily, as the two are highly interdependent.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
It would really suck if we killed off some kind of plant that was going to hold the key to solving a horrible disease of the future.
Conversely, it would really suck if a new mutation of a plant appeared in the future that could cure a horrible disease...and was subsequently overwhelmed by plants that we'd saved.
It's a two-way street. If species don't die off, new ones can't flourish. Don't pretend that you can comprehend what's best for a system as large as the earth.
Anyway, it's not as if it would be catastrophic if say, an entire species of crocodiles died tomorrow - there are hundreds of species of crocodile, and most are very similar in characteristics. The article doesn't mention a specific species of crocodile because it's probably not important.
Same goes for any other species.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
It's a two-way street. If species don't die off, new ones can't flourish. Don't pretend that you can comprehend what's best for a system as large as the earth.
That's not what's been happening - we've been eradicating species left and right for a good 200 years, and new ones usually don't pop back up in their place because we're there.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
There's no sense of "deserving" in the theory of evolution man.
I agree entirely. However we are human beings, with brains, capable of rational thought and able to make decisions about our future. Shall we ignore all of this equipment we evolved with, cast medicine aside, and subject ourselves blindly to evolutionary forces?
I am a physician. I admit that my job consists of working AGAINST evolution. I admit that in the long term my work will increase the amount of disease in the human population simply be ensuring the survival of people who otherwise would have died before mating. Inefficient, defective genes are being passed on because of me.
But on the other hand there is compassion. I am sworn to first, do no harm to you, and second - try to benefit you if I can. No I don't think you should die if you want to live and I have it in my power to help you. Life is short enough as it is! If you don't understand how important compassion is to us humans, well: when it's your turn to get sick, I will show you.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
"I'd happily support a politician who advocated such an action, regardless of how much money it might cost. "??????!
OK, How about all your life's income, and that of all your progeny, in perpetuity?? You'd happily pay that for a cure for AIDS? Would you demand that everyone else pay this price, too?
I suspect you meant to say "I'd happily support a politician who advocated such an action, regardless of how much money it might cost *Somebody Else Besides ME*".
I am Mr. Evil Big Drugs. I just spent $5 billion on AIDS research. The government takes my work from me and gives it away without my consent. What does the public get today? A cure for AIDS. What does the public not get tomorrow? A cure for any other disease I was currently researching, because I'm pulling all funding so that I can bail out with whatever capital I can still scavenge from my dying company.
And who should be the one entitled to "Get rich" from this cure? The scientist who read some charts and took some samples? Or the people who built his lab; built, delivered, installed, and repair his equipment; the power company, the water company, et. al.
What is it exactly that you think scientists do? Stand around until the answer to their problems magically appears? Assuming that the lab owner paid the utility bills and its employees according to their contracts, those parties have zero right to any additional profits - they were already paid for their contribution. That's a strawman, and if you're smart enough to know it, then you should be ashamed. If you're not, then this conversation is pointless.
Your "solution" feels good, as if the government would finally be Doing Something. Too bad it kills millions as Mr. Evil Big Drugs and all of his associates that aren't too stupid to read the writing on the wall jump ship and switch to a different industry.
Economy 101: you fail it.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Distribution is only one problem -- patent protection is another. I believe you are mixing up issues surrounding distribution of drugs that are already in the public domain (which are huge, but surmountable), with the cost issues surrounding cutting-edge drugs (which are harder to deal with).
Once a drug is researched, developed, and tested, the actual cost of production is quite low. An independent company, if allowed to do so, could reproduce the drug and sell it for pennies a pill and still make money. But of course, this isn't how things work. The developer of the drug has 14 years to (1) recoup its R&D and testing costs, (2) make a profit, and (3) pay for the cost of production/marketing/distribution.
So for 14+ years -- between the time the drug is patented and the time generic manufacturers get hold of it -- the drug company is guaranteed by law the exclusive right to make the drug just so that it can make its money. This makes sense as a method to incent the company to develop the drug. However it ignores the human toll that the 14 years of delay will take on parts of the world to whom the drug will be completely unaffordable.
By stepping in at Day 1, the government would compensate the company for its R&D costs and provide the investors their profits. This removes the largest component of the drug's cost. Instead of a customer paying for R&D, testing, and profit, in each pill he or she buys, the customer would instead pay only the cost of production and distribution.
The current situation in South Africa is quite instructive. Factories in South Africa can make retroviral AIDs drugs for a tiny fraction of the cost it takes to buy the drugs from the American/European companies that control the patents. Under intense pressure from the West, South Africa ended up stopping its generic production of the drugs, and now instead purchases them from the patent holders (at a substantial discount). Both sides got a good deal -- company gets tax write-offs for charitable contributions, protects its intellectual property, and gets a PR boost; while the country of South Africa avoids international sanctions and trade wars, while still getting the drugs it needed.
If there is ever a cure for AIDs, I think that cure should be "purchased" by the people of the world and placed into the public domain. (Not, mind you, purchased by the government with the intent to maintain the patent protection. Literally, placed into the public domain. No "licensing" requirement at all. From anyone.) It's just too important. Once the drug is in the public domain, the marketplace again takes over and could be manufactured anywhere in the world by any company (or country) that wishes to get into the business. It would be, essentially, a truly free market for AIDs drugs all over the world without the artificial restrictions patent protection imposes.
Is there still going to be a need for private/governmental charity? Sure. But then the charitable efforts could be focused on the billion people who can't afford generic drugs versus the 6 billion who can't afford patented drugs.
Animals can be disease vectors (see Asian flu scares) or sources for cures or vaccines for certain diseases (e.g. smallpox vaccine using cowpox virus).