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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."
After we've practically wasted penicillin on diseases we should have erradicated such as TB, I'll be crying crocodile tears if we don't make swift work of HIV one day soon.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Well they knew that the Komodo dragon had an extremely strong immune system capable of killing most things, along time ago yet they still havent been able to use that to help anyone... so its likely that this is still a long way off...
"I reject your reality, and substitute my own" - Adam Savage
Spammers are already promoting a product called "The Antidote" supposedly produced from crocodile blood. With these news I think it will get worse.
Here is the FDA's warning.
The worst thing about it is to realize that some desperate people are actually falling for this scam.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
This will come as a great surprise to the many people who have taken antiviral drugs and been cured of various viral diseases. I was cured of some strange recurrant yuppie flu using Acyclovir. Thank $DEITY that I had a GP who had trained as a pharmacist.
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.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
The problem with animal-developed antibodies is that the human body recognizes them as foreign, and soon starts to mount an immune response against them as well.
I have little idea about this kind of stuff but will this matter? I've been taught that HIV/AIDS destroys the immune system.
AFAIK no one claims that drinking wine makes you better educated.
When I worked in this area (Approx 18 years ago), there was good statistical evidence that you needed HIV and some other second factor to get AIDS. However, the HIV gives you AIDS explanaiton was simpler, so there was no funding to investigate the real mechanism. AFAIK, it has not been properly investigated because of political correctness in the funding bodies.
You are one of many people standing in the way of good science leading to a solution to a very serious problem.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
There is a published paper on croc serum in a low impact journal. From the abstract:
Not much chance for using it as an anti-viral agent.
Regardless of whether a learned behviour has no genetic component, it follows that it is still Darwinism when a lethal force acts to remove it from the population. As Dawkins has so ably decribed, memetic effects have an equal, if not greater effect on species fitness (partciularly in complex organisms like humans). For example, take a group of Calahari bushmen and a group of New Yorkers. Both groups are, genetically speaking, practically identical. But transpose their environments, and I can guarantee the New Yorkers would be in dire straits within days. How the Bushmen would fare in the Apple is another matter. The only real differences between them are those of culture, making their memetics paramount to their survival. Memetic traits can be passed regardless of genetic lineage (everyone reading Slashdot right now is exchanging memes).
I might be wrong here, but I was under the impression that the human immunity system cannot kill HIV - otherwise it would simply kill it before it destroys all the T-cells, after which the bone marrow would produce new ones to replenish the supply.
Human immunity system uses a kind of "smart bomb" tactic - it has marker cells, which release chemicals that stick to foreign objects (like viruses or bacteria), and devourer cells that will attack anything that is so marked. This system allows the immunity system to fight effectively without causing too much damage to the host body it is defending. Unfortunately, the marker chemicals need to be custom-tailored for any particular intruder, and this creates a lag between a marker cell noticing a foreign object and devourer cells destroying it (which is why you get sick, get better and then won't get the same sickness for a while - it takes a while to get enough marker chemicals to your bloodstream to mount an effective defense, but once it's there, it stays there at least a while).
Unfortunately, this doesn't work well against HIV viruses, because they mutate their outer shells at such rabid pace that by the time the immunity system is geared to fight one generation, the next generation is already immune to it. HIV is a bit like a criminal that keeps changing disguises constantly - by the time the police force gets wanted posters of him in the latest disguise, he has already switched to a new one.
An effective HIV medicine would not neccessarily need to kill HIV outright, it would just need to be able to stick to any HIV mutation and look like the marker chemical on the outside.
Disclaimer: I'm not a biologist, virologist or a white blood cell, and therefore don't have any first-hand knowledge of human immunity system. All the claims in this post are my own and do not reflect the official position of my immunity system. This means that I could be completely wrong.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
True, the only way to directly prove that HIV causes AIDS would be to infect someone with HIV and find them developing AIDS later. To make that statistically significant (and account for the long incubation period) you would need to do that test on a lot of people, are you willing to volunteer?
No sane doctor or gouvernment will allow such a dangerous test. But you can do something less certain but quite similar with cohort studies. Take a (very) large group of people you suspect are at risk of getting AIDS and test them regularly for HIV and other viral infections. The pattern you see from such studies is HIV-infection with flu-like symptoms and several years later they develop AIDS. No one in the cohort develops AIDS withou the previous HIV infection but some people will never develop AIDS (very long gestation period). That is indeed not 100% proof, but in biology/medicine you never have 100%. If 99% is not good enough for you, then please remember that thousands of people are dying daily from AIDS and resources are finite. There is no room to make odd chance gambles.
The scientific process works via concensus (peer review). That may be not a good model as it can be very hard for breaktrough discoveries to get accepted, but it is like democracy: it may not be very good, but it is the best we have.
18 years! HIV had just been discovered back then. You could drown in all the HIV/AIDS articles that have been published since then. If that hypothesis had any merit it would have been accepted. It is not.
You mistake scientific correctness for political correctness. I believe it is called Ochams razor that states that, when you have two explanations for a phenomenon of equal merit, you go for the simpler one.
And why would that be? I am not a scientist (anymore). Is my opinon standing in the way of your 'good science'? Why would the science that is conducted now be not good enough. Sure it has not found a cure yet, but with current drugs, AIDS detoriation can be stopped or reversed. With those drugs it has become a chronic disease instead of a terminal disease. I'd say that is pretty good.
As for you and all the other dissidents: It is human nature to be attracted to odd chances and underdogs. But this is not literature or fiction, and in the real world no sane person goes for a chance of 1 in a million. Science is not a religion. You are allowed to think or believe whatever you want, and if you can make a coherent point people might actually listen to you. But don't expect funding just because you are so very different. If most people think you are wrong, then you don't get the money of most people.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
These defensins have been found in many different organisms, from fish to plants to humans. I think this article is actually talking about an innate immune response, since adaptive immunity requires previous exposure to a pathogen, leading to production of specific antibodies. Defensins have a fairly broad anti-microbial activity, and some have already been isolated and shown to be effective against gram-positive and -negative bacteria, fungi, viruses and insects (no one defensin acts against all these, though)
Sick of WoW? Try the thinking man's MMORPG: EVE Online
I've read a fair bit of Peter Deusberg's theories.
To start off with, he's not a nutcase. He's done some important work with oncogenic viruses, and was the recipient of an outstanding investigator grant.
This grant was revoked because of purely political reasons, which is blatantly unethical.
My genetics professor for my senior year in college (2000) confirmed this when I talked to him about Deusberg, saying that Deusberg had been treated unfairly.
Of course, neither I nor my college professor agree with Deusberg's hypothesis, but the criticism of HIV research done by Deusberg and others has suffered a lot of political suppresion, particularly when HIV was first being discovered and people were in panic mode. Deusberg has not been treated fairly, and the political suppresion has had the effect that unjust censorship often does. If you want shoddy science, frankly, Fauci's early HIV research contains more than enough of it to go around. And the scanning electron microscope pictures of HIV attacking CD4 cells deserved to be questioned, since SEM photos are easily biased (take 100 photos and pick the one you want.)
AZT was approved for HIV treatment quicker than almost any drug in FDA history because it was rushed through. There's still no valid scientific study that I'm aware of that proves AZT extends lifespan, and the Concord Study was horribly flawed, with people in the experimental group sharing their medication with those in the control group to try and "help" them - a criticism of Deusberg's which is relevant to the current debate. As of 3-4 years ago, AZT was still a component in antiviral cocktails with scientists unwilling to do a controlled study for "ethical reasons" comparing it to the tuskeege institute study, etc. ( not sure about presently)
AZT is a highly toxic DNA chain terminator and was used some time ago as chemotherapy against cancer. Ironically, it's capable of simulating the effects of AIDS (i.e. immune suppression.) If you take AZT, you will get chemotheraputically induced immune suppression that mimics AIDS.
Further, almost none of the "AIDS" cases in Africa (possibly excluding S. Africa) are confirmed via western methods - i.e. either an ELISA test or PCR. If you have a disease associated with immune suppresion, you're assumed to have HIV. Starvation combined with other stressors can also cause immune suppression.
The grandparent poster was correct in that HIV almost never infects a person by itself - there's almost always some other co-infection, in part because HIV is such a weak virus. Deusberg's claim was that HIV was a marker virus, which remains an accurate description even if HIV does cause AIDS. HIV is almost always an indicator of other infections. Even people who have been subjected to HIV contaminated needlesticks are unlikely to actually get HIV. HIV is often an opportunistic infection itself, that takes advantage of a strained immune system or a break in the body's defenses.
As for this article, it seems a bit overblown to me. Scientists have been searching for an animal model for HIV for a while. I haven't kept up in the research recently, so what I'm saying is about 3 years behind the times or so, but frankly I'd be more impressed if human HIV was found to replicate inside crocodiles and cause illness rather than the opposite. There are plenty of animals which are not harmed by the HIV virus and the lack of effective animal models was a longtime problem in HIV research. Nothing new here.
I'm not so interested in crocodile antibodies, which I doubt would help humans. But if crocs have an interferon-like component to their blood, perhaps that could be useful.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
The "scientist" that you mention somewhat negaively is Mr Kary Mullis - inventor of the PCR. winner of the Chemistry Noble in 1989.
http://www.karymullis.com/
His invention, the PCR, is the primary means of testing for AIDS antibodies in popular AIDS tests - Western blot and ELISA.
Mr Mullis is completely and totally against people blindly trusting the PCR process for the above tests. His stand is that there is so much molecular debris in any sample that the probalbity of a false positive is very high.
He is also a very strongly opponent of the HIV = AIDS theory. He says that inspite of very aggressive hunting, he could not trace the papers that were sited in the orignal paper connecting HIV to AIDS. According to him the whole HIV=AIDS connection stands on baseless grounds.
Read his facinating book "Dancing Naked in the Mind Fields" for his take on the above.
So if their immune system is more "primitive", is it in some way inferior? The reason I ask is, we usually assume that evolution doesn't add complexity to organisms to make them weaker with absolutely no benefit (which I know is debatable, but I'm talking general trends).
If I were a biologist, I might have a more precise question here, but I'm just curious to know (in a loose way of speaking): Are there grounds for concern that evolution might have gone with our less-primitive approach to immunity for good reason?
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.
Of course, those scientists are generally being paid to do their work, often with taxpayer money (that's where government grants come from). So the parent isn't 100% wrong either. It kind of sucks when my taxpayer money results in the discovery of something useful, then I find out it'll cost me an arm and a leg to actually take advantage of that discovery.
P.S. This criticism is supposed to apply to both new products (like drugs) and new knowledge, which is far too often published in expensive academic journals and not given to the public for far too long, even when that research is publicly funded.
I have always hoped that should a real cure for AIDs be developed that the United States government would sieze the intellectual property and put it into the public domain.
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.
The other interesting scenario would be an ultra-rich executive or even a company who wanted to secure their place in history. Could a private individual purchase the rights to such a thing? Would a company think the forgone profits were worth the enormous PR boost? Wishful thinking perhaps.
What's the alternative? Have the same pharmacuitical industry complex distribute the drug? I mean we have drugs that cure malaria and all sorts of other things, and we still can't/won't get it to the people who need it. I'm not a naive bleeding heart -- I know the distribution and other problems in Africa (in particular), but we have to at least try, right?
For a citation that has probably very much relevance to the researcher's phrase "adaptive immune system (like mammals)" in response to your post, look at the research behind a Nobel Prize given not long ago for "The Generative Grammar of the Immune System"..
Modern research is showing that most dinosaurs which left sufficiently detailed fossils were feathered. So it could be a serious problem. They'd look like vultures with teeth.
-aiabx
Just this guy, you know?
For e.g. we kill rats to stop the spreading of plague, and mosquitoes to stop the spreading of malaria.
Yeah, like that'll ever happen - may as well try to kill all the roaches. Most of the species we eradicate live in isolated habitats, which we then bulldoze for whatever reason.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"