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Gene Found In Black Death Survivors Stops HIV
WindozeSux writes "According to research done by Dr. Stephen O'Brien, a mutated gene known as delta 32 found in Black Death survivor descendants, stops HIV in its tracks. In order to be immune both parents have to have the delta 32 gene. From the Article: 'In 1996, research showed that delta 32 prevents HIV from entering human cells and infecting the body. O'Brien thought this principle could be applied to the plague bacteria, which affects the body in a similar manner. To determine whether the Eyam plague survivors may have carried delta 32, O'Brien tested the DNA of their modern-day descendents...'"
....brainnnzzzz.....
The Black Death.
Oh yeah, we're cookin' now!
KFG
... will it stop zombies?
This kind of solution to "curing" HIV is probably as close as we'll ever get to solving the problem. It's not going to be a wonder drug, it will be simple natural selection. Black Death came and those with the mutation survived, they didn't find a cure. Hopefully with todays technologies not only those with the mutation can survive the global epidemic that is HIV, but science can bring the benefits of that mutation to all of us.
Now you can go out and have unprotected sex............
Yeah, seriously........only sex here is solo sex.
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
NOT!!
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
is there then an implication some are more vulnerable
. . . is another's saving trait.
This article is interesting on several levels. The fact that some people are completely immune to the disease isn't really remarkable. That's been known for quite some time. What's amazing is that this fairly basic gene (a way of bringing stuff into cells) is completely redundant. It makes me wonder how much of our cellular machinery is simply there in case another part fails.
Don't worry. I don't think there's intelligent design behind it. Just cases of plagues that have swept through populations from time to time, causing these interesting redundancies to appear.
I saw a show about this on PBS a few years ago. Really interesting, but not necessarily a recent discovery.
As I understand it, Plauge is a bateria that can be treated these days. And a little bit of vaccine trivia for you:
Cow pox infection survivors didn't get Small pox, so that's how the innoculation for mankind's only "eliminated" disease began to be put under control.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
of such discoveries is medicine made. now, the difficult part is going to be getting the experiments to prove it into the public eye, infecting "32" blood with HIV in vitro, and then taking that research into the luddite chambers of policymakers.
we'll have fun galore when that happens. a true righteous moral civil war.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Yea, I thought this wasn't big news too. I saw it on PBS as well, a show about the mutations that modern day things like pennicillin cause in respriratory diseases in Russian prisons.
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
I saw it when it aired, too. It was fascinating. I was in PubMed and reading the article it cites before the show even finished airing.
It's also reminiscent of how (no one knows exactly why) the gene for sickle cell anemia provides resistance to malaria, thus has yet to be expunged from the human gene pool.
i am a soviet space shuttle
So what's stopping me from having science insert that gene into my offspring?
to the website. The website is about researching into the gene CCR5 related to its ability to prevent infection from the Black Death, based on the research in 1996 that showed it was able to block out HIV infection.
"This kind of solution to "curing" HIV is probably as close as we'll ever get to solving the problem."
Wow! Guess that whole abstenance thing didn't work out. How about not sharing needles? Or screening blood donations. Maybe what we really mean is that we don't have a solution to AIDS that still allows us to engage in those destructive behaviours we all enjoy.
Plague doesn't cause the mutation, it SELECTS the mutation.
i.e. if you don't have the mutation, plague won't give it to you. It just won't kill you even if you don't get treated if you have the mutation.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Things like this put an interesting spin on science in general. Trying not to be off topic here, but if we are to reach anything like a utopian state (think Star Trek here) then we, as a race, have to overcome quite a few thresholds. The number of people on the planet is one, the fact that modern medicine is allowing more mutations to survive, including weak mutations (read that as mutations that weaken the population over time rather than insert survival traits like immunity to AIDS).
...
The things that we are doing through science for money is going to become a wall that will stop us in the future, or can. Right now, it is unknown if our vegetable and foodstuffs are actually as valuable to the human body as they are supposed to be. I'm not talking about hamburgers, but raw vegetables. Pesticides and genetic modifications of crops is changing how they are used by the body.
Its not improbable that scientists could insert the immunity genes via foodstuffs in the near future, rather like making us all part of a super race... or rather the benefactors of the genetic makeup of superhumans. This process, in the course of history, has always wiped much of the world clean of the weaker specimens, leaving those with the stronger mutations to live on. That in turn drags down the rest of the population as genetic weakness is passed on.
This is a reasonable idea, just give the good genes to everyone.... but morally, that is the wrong thing to do. It will turn out that only those with an extra $150k will get the therapy... no insurance will cover it, 3rd world citizens can't buy it, and its not so different than what some of Hitler's folks were attempting to do (at least in some respects)
So, will it be superhumans or ginormous global conglomerates that run the future earth?
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Nobody seems to have noticed that TFA is just a summary of a TV show. And one that doesn't seem to have that much to say about Delta 32 either. Anyway, judging from Google, Delta 32 is old news.
Isn't polio relatively unknown nowadays as well? And if you want to talk about diseases, not just infections, you can add scurvy and pellagra to the list (with a large asterisk pointing out that food supply problems (i.e., famine) cause outbreaks).
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
yes it's very old news, found this at http://www.lexiline.com/lexiline/lexi76.htm -
The August 7, 1998, German daily, Die Welt, contained an article by Susanne Horst
"Zehn Prozent der Europaeer sind vor Aids geschuetzt", summarizing the genetic findings of the national cancer center in Chicago as presented by molecular biologist Stephen J. O'Brien.
Human Gene Mutation CCR-5-delta-32
There is apparently a human gene mutation, "Mutation CCR-5-delta-32", which makes its holders nearly immune to AIDS, since this gene has no receptor for AIDS-similar viruses.
Whoever has inherited this gene from BOTH parents is fairly immune to AIDS. Whoever has inherited this gene from only ONE parent also has a good deal of immunity. (The immunity is not perfect in either case, since rare strains of AIDS can use the receptor CXCR 4).
Ten years out of date, dude.
What kind of idiot thinks that joke was off topic?
what! you saw something interesting on PBS? :)
geda-outta-here!
Arash
Arash Partow's Philosophy: Be a person who knows what they don't know, and not a person who doesn't know.
We're pretty crude about modifying DNA. When we cured a bunch of kids that had some lung-related genetic disease, a good number of them got cancer. It seems that we scrambled the DNA while patching it.
of salt, a little bit of DNA with black death in it...
BAM, BAM, BAM!!!!!!!!!
Thanks for watching our show, the cure for HIV will be on next week again at 8:00 on the food network.
Yeah, seriously........only sex here is solo sex.
I have a girl coming around for sex tonight. And she's not getting paid either. Gimme your mod points and I'll teach you how to get lucky too.
Corporations would patent the genes. If you had kids, you or they would be violating the patent. Probably your "enhanced" DNA would also contain a copy protection mechanism that you couldn't bypass without violating the DMCA. For example, you might be born without the necessary organs.
This story is interesting, but as you mention, it isn't new.
This is the Zonk Effect in action. A mutation that Zonk has allows hime to think old news is news. So he forwards this. Another mutation causes Zonk to pass off press releases as news -- see today's "Microsoft as Vigilante" story.
Folks like you happen to have the "Google" mutation, which means that you are immune to mistaking old information for "new". When you see something interesting, you Google it, and immeditately discover that you've been "Zonked".
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
How can this be? It thought science in America was dead ...you know, with the fascist fundamentalist tyrant we have power who is worse than Saddam and Hitler combined??
Tell me how to think slashdot!!!!
Religion goes back as far as human history has been documented. Being that the basic tenants of religion build on each other, I often wonder if promiscuity is shunned in almost all of oldest civilizations because it comes from an implicit form of survival. In other words, if you have just one faithfull partner, your chances of survival are much MUCH greater in times of a massive STD pandemic.
Take Africa and Asia for example where AIDs runs rampent. If this trend continues, only the religiously faithfull and monogamous will survive to carry on their genes and culture. In the mean time, I think we are seeing a deadly transition taking place.
Life is not for the lazy.
dude, if you're in a russian prison, pennicillin-causing-mutations probably don't make the top 100 list of your current problems.
..Think of it as a gift to future generations. There was a Secrets of the Dead episode about this on PBS which was pretty interesting. Mystery of the Black Death
I've known about this for a while, the discovery channe did a special about this a while back. Slashdot needs to get with tbe times man. :-)
"Religion goes back as far as human history has been documented. Being that the basic tenants of religion build on each other, I often wonder if promiscuity is shunned in almost all of oldest civilizations because it comes from an implicit form of survival. In other words, if you have just one faithfull partner, your chances of survival are much MUCH greater in times of a massive STD pandemic."
There's also the mental benifits that go with having a single partner for life. Just ask all the married guys and gals here.
Best comment ever. Why can't there be like one comment that is allowed to be modded up to +6 every year or so?
is you blame people for what a virus does. i used to be an aids educator before antiretrovirals came out in the early 90s. i remember at one conference on the issue i went to there were basically 2 dominant subgroups: gay men and black women. the black women were saying things like "this horrible gay disease, if gay men weren't so promiscuous we wouldn't have to deal with aids." the gay men were saying things like "this horrible african disease, if some african hadn't had sex with a monkey (a surprisingly common idiocy about aids) we wouldn't have to deal with aids."
do you see the parallel between their attitude and their attitude yet? the point is very simple: people were blaming each other, for what a virus does. no one is to blame for aids, no matter what they do, seriously, that's the most moral and honest and intelligent and wise position you can take on aids and human behavior. i'm 100% serious!
the point is to fight the virus, not fight other people (and, yes, your atittude promotes blaming people rather than the disease). you're whole "every body stop having risky sex" line is very pat, simple, and convenient. and absolutely useless against fighting aids. people have risky sex: all races, all classes, all types of moral upbringing, all attitutes.
need i demonstrate some recent trips from memory of moral demagogues loudly spouting out about moral behavior and then breaking their own rules?:
1. william bennett, sage of american morality: degenerate gambler
2. rush limbaugh, voice of personal accountability: drug addict
3. jim bakker, great religous authority: adulterer
4. etc., etc.
closeted gays, sex addicts, adulterers... they would be the first to pat you on the back and go "here, here" and clap to your words and smile at what you say... and then what would they do in their bedroom? do you see your problem yet? your words have no value. it's just a big public mass exercise in "do as i say, not as i do" and no one takes it seriously, because everyone is a hypocrit when it comes to something as complex about human sexuality, including, and most prominently, about their own sexuality. so your attitude is great lip service, but it doesn't translate into reality.
please, wake up: human behavior is complex, it doesn't fit your simple prescriptions. you fight the VIRUS, you don't blame people at ALL. because you know who wins when we turn on each other and blame each other?
the virus wins
and do you know what you get when you blame people for their disease? ("you deserve it") a cold heartless existence. is this compassionate conservatism you are esousping here? (snicker)
yu are not the first to make blanket overriding statements about how humans SHOULD behave, without any wisdom about how people DO behave, and then just say "you get what you deserve". but this doesn't make you wise, nor moral. it makes you part of the problem.
please, when you say the words you say, do not for the slightest bit think you are a moral or intelligent person. to be so willfully or naively blind of real human behavior, THAT DOES NOT CHANGE, AND IS CONSTANT ACROSS ALL UPBRINGINGS, is ignorance at best, evil at worst.
yes: you and your atittude. ignorant, or evil. personal accountability is important in life. but when it comes to disease, the punishment you are saying is acceptable for something so natural as sex only makes you out to be heartless or blind.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
UCSC Genome browser - has the whole gene, but you can zoom in on segments if you want.
NIH - this has links or links to links of everything you'd want to know.
NEXT PROBLEM!!!
So one guy is immune to HIV. We use virus carriers to alter our DNA to include that particular gene. Another guy is immune to so and so cancer. We all get that gene too, the way we get flu shots.
So in a few decades, do we all look alike? Do we all become equally vulnerable to a new strain?
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
about sanctimonious, holier than thou moralizers who speak about human behavior as if it were so pat and simple, and in their purposeful idiocy on the matter of complex human behavior, especially human sexuality, smile serenely and blame people for what happens to them
and then they talk about COMPASSIONATE conservatism?!
it makes my blood boil
you need a complex approach to a complex situation
saying "don't have sex, and if you do, shame on you" is not morality, is not intelligence
it's ignorance at best, evil at worst
social conservatives are guilty of being simpletons about human behavior
they pretend that just snapping your fingers and everyone just behaving a certain way no human society has ever behaved in our entire history makes perfect sense to them
and, like most naive simpletons, they speak the loudest about the problems they make themselves busy with
the more i think about, the more i am convinced that social conservatives are the most evil of influences on human society
at least criminals and terrorists are direct and honest about their malignance, when they ar epunished, they can at least begin to understand what they did wrong
but social conservatives? social conservatives are a social malignance that believes it to be a virtue
since when is being a simpleton and being a loud busy body about problems involving complex human behavior ever been anything but part of the problem?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
you're right, being moral jerk-offs in the face of a virus is pretty stupid.
but at the same point, the virus is spread by very specific behavior. regardless of morals, religion, or politics, avoiding that behavior stops the spread of the virus. I don't match the risky behavior, so I have 0 concern about contracting AIDs.
but you are asking people to stop having sex
;-P ) that's a complete absurdity
for anyone except slashdot posters on a friday night (
look around you: there over 6 billion of us
that didn't happen without a drive to have sex that is, of course, like all animals on this planet, our prime biological directive
defeating it, or dismissing it out of hand is an utterly insane position to take on the matter of aids
seriously: what you are saying, it's also like saying "well the solution to not being poisoned by cynanide gas is to stop breathing"
the words you say are exactly the same as that
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Does it make them immune to bird flu.
Does a Christian soccer team even need a goalkeeper?
You forgot the public health measure that always gets ignored...
4. Quarantine
If it worked for other diseases, why isn't it used here?
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
...to point out that, in these days of mass panic over the current (relatively harmless to humans) H5N1 avian flu virus, there is but one cry we all think of.... "Bring out yer dead!" (For non-UK readers: a tabloid panic over bird flu has just swept the country - hundreds of tabloid hacks have cottoned onto the notion of an inevitable pandemic leading to mass graves, collapse of society as the economy grinds to a halt, etc, and totally failed to understand the connection between the current bird flu epidemic, and the potential future human pandemic. Retroviruses are such pesky buggers...
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
Calm down people!
There is quite a few methods currently being researched that could cure HIV. It's not a done deal til HIV is actually cured in infected people right now.
Another possible method is:
Crocodile's Immune System Kills HIV
\
- siblings and their children
- children you may already have, and their children
- nephews, nieces, aunts, uncles, etc.
They share more of your DNA than some random person, so it counts. You could babysit your brother's grandkids so that both parents can support the family better. That counts.You mention a very, very interesting fact, which blew me away when I learned it about our genetics. What is it with (1) all this pointless intron DNA, and (2) all this God-damned splicing? Why don't the prokaryotes do that stuff? This is, as you say, weird.
So is it an accident? Given that there've been only about 10^5 generations of homo sapiens, whereas bacteria do that every 2-3 years, and they've been around billions of years -- is it just that we've not evolved as far as they? Will our DNA be a lot tighter in 30,000,000 AD (assuming we survive at all)?
Or is there some reason designed in by...(audience holds breath)...no, not God for, uh, Christ's sake...but by natural selection that gives us an advantage with all this DNA swapping?
Have I not heard the thought that it might be because a bacteria's big problem is a hostile environment and his lack of ability to manipulate it other than eating it, whereas one of our big problems (before modern medicine) was fighting off viral attackers? And, if that's the case, this screwball shuffling around of the DNA, plus "hiding" the real genes amongst acres of useless, identical-looking trash are clever techniques for making us much more elusive targets for viruses.
Joe Virus successfully invades the pathetic human cell, sneaking past the killer white cells, snipping the wire and snaking under the membrane while the guard dogs howl....he makes it! Cleverly picks the lock on the super-secure citadel of the nucleus, gets out his dynamite, blows the doors off the chromatid fiber, and, chortling, inserts his DNA sequence into the host DNA.
But alas for Joe, 90% of the DNA is never used, and so Joe has a 90% chance of having inserted himself into a string of rubbish that will never be transcribed. Poor bastard, waiting and waiting...
Now to get back on topic, I've also heard that one caution people have about gene therapy (such as slipping in a gene that protects against HIV) is that if there are these ancient unexpressed viruses lying about in our DNA, what might we do if we muck around with it by slipping in some new genes? Might we accidentally "turn on" a virus dormant since the next to last Ice Age? If it's just a Neanderthal version of a head cold, big deal -- but what if it's something far worse than AIDS itself? As fatal as AIDS, say, but with a 60 day mean survival time and the ability to be spread through the air? Brrr.
I saw this shit on PBS high def last year. OLD FUCKING NEWS
From an account of Jenner's first successful experiment:
"[Jenner] decided deliberately to introduce [cowpox] into a patient to see if the effect could be artificially produced. Soon afterwards, he would again inoculate his patients, this time with live smallpox virus ("variolation"), to see if the cow-pox had worked. The "healthy boy" whom Jenner, on May 14 1796, first vaccinated with [cowpox] virus from the dairymaid Sarah Nelmes was James Phipps, who proved Jenner's point by surviving repeated unsuccessful attempts to infect him with smallpox."
Boy, ethical standards in medical research have sure changed, haven't they?
The only possible use this gene could have is to aid in the study of synthetic protiens that might just block the infectious mechanisms of HIV and God only knows what other diseases that use that particular cellular route. I personally have HepC genotype 1, and I can tell you that the only way to deal with retroviruses is to develope agents that will block the cellular pathways of infection, (without being too toxic). There has been some advances in the understanding of the routes of infection on a cellular level.
One of the most promising is the fact that some forms of sugars, Xylatol for example will lock out the codons of some retroviruses. Different forms of Xylatol have been used for centuries to treat virual diseases, without the primatives knowing why. For example wild rose hips create different forms of sugars that in effect ferment on the vine. Norwegian and Finish (Norse) people still prescibe it as a flue/virus remedy. It is in their pharmacopia, and is prescribed by Doctors.
To make this gene usefull is a long shot at best. The most effective treatments for retroviruses might be sitting right under our noses and we just have not recognised them!
Gene That Stops HIV Found In Black Death Survivors.
Which side is CyboGates on?
Then may your nights forever be filled with lonely HIV infected women.
When can I get tested!?
Now it strikes me as appropriate that under Clinton, America was making great leaps to stop this STD. This is obviously so Clinton will eventually not have to dispose of his cigars after use. Clinton has a big interest in genetics because he comes from Arkansas so his parents are probably brother and sister. His interest in genetics has been explored with his distribution of genetic material all around the world, in fact, I have heard it told that the reason it is so hard to impress Chelsea is that she has no intention of having a relationship with her half brother (which statistically, most guys probably are).
So in conclusion, Clinton: smart, witty, a great leader, but also very easy to make fun of. In short, perfect head of state. It was so sad he never became chancellor of Oxford, that would be the coolest thing ever.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
There was a plague of syphillis in the 1500s. Seems it came from America when Columbus sailed across the ocean. The French called it the 'English disease', and the English called it the 'French disease'. The arabs called it the 'Disease of the Christians.'
Friedrich Nietzsche, Al Capone, and Charles the VII are all thought to have had Syphillis.
Qxe4
This should be moderated as freakish!
There are more species, even primates like the Bonobo, that use sex as an active social tool.
Humanities evolution would have been quite different without this social aspect.
I would even go so far as to claim that many, if not most, wars were fought because a guy wanted to impress some dame (or her parents) with the power and riches resulting from victory.
Women might go for gold or diamonds, men go for (sexually!) attractive women.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Immunity is for animals and savages. Civilization means wiping out the disease, not the people who are vulnerable. Welcome to civilization -- start getting used to it. Of course, you could go find some empty island and implement your insane nietsche-esque ideas. I hope dying of whatever you're vulnerable to is worth it. The rest of us will happily watch as disease after disease is scoured from the earth. I hear that chicken pox is high the WHO's agenda as a candidate for extermination.
This is the natural progression of evolution tho, those who have this gene are a step above the rest of us in the evolutionary scale. If it weren't for modern technology,
Humans and their techs are a natural product of evolution, so I don't think it's a good idea to oppose the techs and the evolution.
Nowadays, what matter the most is the rapid evolution of ideas, aka memetics:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics
Several companies have already developed or are in the process of developing CCR5 inhibitors which bind to the site and stop things such as HIV from entering the cell to begin with.
While this is not a cure, it bodes well for long term suppression of HIV given its hard to mutate against. (unlike things like NNRTIs and Protease Inhibitors).
is how this mutation got into the general population in the first place.
The current operating theory, as I understand it, is that it originated (uhhh ... mutated?) somewhere in southern Finland, made it's way across the Baltic Sea to Sweden, and from there fanned out across Europe and West Asia during the period of Viking expansion -- from about the 8th-10th centuries.
The mutation is found in native populations as far away as Cyprus and North Africa; but the closer you get to Scandinavia, the more prevalent it becomes. So, really, the Vikings were doing the rest of Europe a public service while they were casually burning it into the ground.
Plunder. The gift that keeps on giving
...But the gene only stops HIV type 1. The delta 32 gene mutation would not prevent infection from HIV type 2.
From this journal:
"Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) type 2, the second AIDS-associated human retrovirus, differs from HIV-1 in its natural history, infectivity, and pathogenicity, as well as in details of its genomic structure and molecular behavior."
Type 2 is the predominant strain of the virus in Africa, so knowledge of the delta 32 mutation will have little effect on the spread of the virus in this epidemic.
However, this discovery can still potentially lead to a vaccination/cure for HIV type 1 which is the predominant strain in Europe, and possibly other areas of the world (including the middle east and western Asia), which is still very necessary.
Steve
But still no cure for cancer...
Apparently many Slashdotters are "quarantined" from AIDS.
"So far, the art of modifying a person's genetic makeup is in its infancy"
You know what's the main problem with gene modification and germline modification?
Scenario A: You can't have kids, because Corp M says it's unauthorized reproduction of their intellectual property.
Hopefully that will be fixed soon. But a world with Scenario A sure looks more likely than things being fixed.
I saw a TV show on PBS a few months ago about this very subject. It's kind of interesting that two such deadly diseases work in almost the same way. I hope this knowledge can be used to formulate some kind of vaccine or cure for HIV, but I think, even knowing this key piece of information, it might be out of our grasp for a while yet.
"I have a girl coming around for sex tonight. And she's not getting paid either. Gimme your mod points and I'll teach you how to get lucky too."
I'd hardly call refusing to pay a prostitute "getting lucky".
That's easier said than just done.
... normal cleaning is not enough to kill active virus loads on infected surfaces.
Consider that exposure to the cracks in ones skin, either natural or induced by shaving, walking bare foot, abrasions from sports activity, accidents, etc leaves one open to infection by infected surfaces. The virus is relatively hard to kill, and requires surfaces be agressively cleaned when
known bodily fluids from infected people have contaminated the surface. It lives for weeks in dead corpses held at low storage temps.
Now consider the potential impact of sharing locker rooms, showers, and lavitories with HIV women at that time of the month. Consider the surfaces in the motel you are about to rent
So far, few women outside Africa are infected, but as that at risk population spreads, life as we know it today, just isn't nearly as safe.
90% of the DNA is never used, and so Joe has a 90% chance of having inserted himself into a string of rubbish that will never be transcribed.
That's not quite true. Many retroviruses and retrotransposons carry their own promoter sequences with them, so they increase the chance of transcription by the cellular machinery. It gets trickier when you have something like SINES, however, which lack promoter elements. They basically cluster near LINES, which carry promoter activity, so that the SINES get transcribed along with the LINES.
Da Blog
Actually, if you are a male, the condom is just about worthless. Take note that herpes and HIV are both easily transmitted from the vaginal fluids to skin abrasions caused by normal sex or just your scratching your balls.
The condom may help protect females from a males HIV infected ejaculate, assuming it's applied before anything starts, and careful prevention against leakage/breakage is taken.
PBS ran a documentary on this a few years ago. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/case_plague/index. html
Actually non-sexual transmission is a high risk that is carefully downplayed. When you read the professional requirements regarding handling and cleanup of bodily fluids and the research about just how viable this virus is it's pretty scary at best. Consider that the required cleanup in schools these days for a kids bloody nose requires the complete assumption that the blood IS contaminated simply because of a don't ask, don't tell policy to protect HIV positive students rights. Tell that to your little kid that gets covered by another kids bloody nose during normal activities at school.
Consider that HIV remains active in corpses stored at low temps for weeks, so room temp is a very viable environment for this virus, particularly in high humidity environments.
Consider the HIV infected women at that time of the month, that is sharing locker rooms, showers, lavitories, or was even the previous tenant for the motel room you are about to rent. Consider every surface that she may contaminate by sitting down, showering, or walking back from a shower, or touching after changing pads/tampons or just wiping after using the toliet.
Health industry folks are pretty careful to avoid occupational exposure, the the same level of concern in the general population is greatly down played to avoid panic.
In fact, that's exactly the link in the summary.
Which is why this is hardly news. The discovery of the CCR5-delta32 gene's relevance to the black death and AIDS dates back to at least 1996; the article in that link is dated 1998.
And the PBS web site the synopsis refers to is dated 2002. So the submitter can't even claim that this is an article about a new TV show.
Information about the CCR5-\Delta-32 and possible links with selection events occuring with respect to the plague have been known for several years, but there is no concensus on the issue.
/not/ been seen (and if there is a paper reference that claims to do so, I would very much like to see it), is evidence that yersinia pestis and HIV actually use the same receptor, and thus the selection event even makes any sense. Given that yersinia pestis is a bacteria (albeit one with a large plasmid), and HIV a virus, this seems, at a perfunctory first thought, unlikely. However, it could be true.
/virus/), and has been with humanity for 1000s of years, could have selected for such a deletion. The catastrophic nature of the event was never has high as that of yersinia pestis, but it was recurrent throughtout generations.
What has
The article seems to imply that this deletion is only evident in the people of Eyam...as you can imagine, this is not the case. It is evident in different levels amongst ethnic groups worldwide. See Stephens et al, "Dating the Origin of the CCR5-Delta32 AIDS-resistance allele by the coalesence of haplotypes", American Journal of Human Genetics, 62: 1507-1515,1998.
Eyeballing the data, it looks like the further you get from Europe, the less likely to have high levels of the allele.
Which is odd, if the black plague is at fault. There are several theoreis as to the origin of yersinia pestis, the most common being a transfer from marmot populations in Mongolia/Inner Mongolia (they are still a resevoir of the disease...but then so are ground squirrels in California), and another hypothesis being of a sub-saharan African origin. The answer, I suspect, will never be perfectly resolved ( I blame the marmots..), but it is in precisely these orginating areas (potentially), that the humans have the lowest levels of he mutation.
There was an excellent article (whose reference I cannot currently find, I apologize), that used a population dynamics approach, and concluded that the current levels of the deletion are too high to have been caused entirely by the black death selection event - that event is too recent for such a high allelic frequency. However, a longer history of influenza (which is a
The history and biology of yersinia pestis, and HIV/AIDS are fascinating. I suggest that one does some reading on the history of governmental ineptitude and institutional discrimination surrounding both. Black Plague, San Fransisco, 1905. AIDS, San Fransisco, 1980.
Insanity is contagious. - Yossarian
It is indeed old news... I think this documentary covered it. I'm pretty sure it was something from digital distractions and that's the only one on the plague I'm seeing.
Hopefully it didn't take this to prove that to you.
On this point, recall that we eukaryotes are in fact heirs to the same ~3.5 billion years of prokaryote evolution that is also the inheritance of present-day bacteria (being that eukaryotes most likely simply emerged as one branch of specialized prokaryotes). It is only in the past 600 million years or so that our lineage diverged from theirs, so it seems inapt to say that we haven't evolved as far as they (or conversely, they as far as we). We're all equally "evolved," as such, but simply in different directions.
(By analogy in the field of comparative linguistics, both Romanian and Brazilian Portuguese are equally descendants of Latin, although they have taken quite different paths in phonology, vocabulary, etc., since their respective schisms from the parent language some ~1500 years ago. Thus it would be odd to say that one of those two descendant languages is "more evolved" than the other, just as it would to say such about prokaryotes and eukaryotes.)
Not to take away from your conjectures, which I found interesting.
It's happening in the US too. It seems the press is determined to invent a disaster if one refuses to happen on its own. I mean, yes, birds are getting sick. But the worst we've see so far is "experts fear bird flu might mutate and jump to humans".
It's completely ridiculous. Don't we have enough problems without inventing them?
And personally, I'd also say, don't help them along. Drop this pandemic BS. It's called an epidemic. I know people go on TV and say there's a difference, a pandemic is worldwide, an epidemic is not. But previous things like the black death or SARS or the 1918 bird flu breakout are now refererred to as pandemics too (try searching for it). It's just the invention of a new word becuase the old one didn't seem serious (scary) enough anymore. "Oh, we had a flu epidemic in 1999, we survived that. Oh, sh*t, this is a PANdemic? I'm scared again."
Don't let your words work towards their scaring agenda too.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Chef: The Black Death? Are you sure?
Stan: What's the Black Death, Chef?
Chef: LaToya Jackson, children.
The Boys: Oh.
Chef: But I think back in those days it meant something else: the plague!
--South Park Episode 502 - "It Hits The Fan"
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
yes, i also saw a documentary about this on public tv many years ago. interesting, but old news. i mean, it even says 1996 right in the article... no vaccine or cure or anything has come out of it since then. yawn...
We don't know what side effects delta 32 might have. (Although the fact that there doesn't yet seem to be evidence of a higher prevalence of any diseases among the populations with high numbers of delta 32 mutations is a good sign.)
As to expressing the genes - It's a lot easier to get a cell coating protein expressed than one that affects the whole body. In this case, it might be possible to only modify the precursors to white blood cells, creating HIV-immune white blood cells. Once the white blood cells (specifically CD4 T-cells if I recall correctly) are protected, HIV is no longer such a big problem. HIV stops being such a nasty virus once its ability to compromise the immune system is removed. I've always wondered why medical researchers have never taken such an approach - rather than try to wipe out the virus with drugs, find a way to modify CD4 cells so that HIV can't attack them, and then let the (no longer compromisable) immune system clean up the virus.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
The CDC (Center for Disease Control) has presented this information for years (1998 is when I first heard it from them) at their seminars for charities that work with HIV positive persons. The mass media has apparently avoided this information even thought th CDC has presented it to them, just because it wasn't newsworthy or controversial as the deaths from HIV as they could be associated to homosexuality or to drug use (considered better shock topics). They have even known and offered to many of these HIV charity members the opportunity to have testing done to determine (and join in a group study) possible suceptability to HIV based on this. All this for years...
Virii isn't the plural of virus? Next you'll try to tell me that "boxen" isn't plural of "box".
1. Sex is *not* primarily for producing children... you'll produce a sprog maybe a couple of times in your life. You'll normally have sex at least a few times more than that (well maybe your church won't let you, but most people will). Sex is *fun*. Enjoy it while you're young.
Let's eliminate the whole moralistic and religious side of the thing, as well as assertions based on someone's feelings about whether sex is "for" or "not for" producing children.
Sex is an action that (a) is pleasurable, (b) can produce children, and (c) with modern technology, can be prevented from producing children.
Now, given that you have something that is pleasurable, it's going to be used as a source of entertainment. You can try to *stop* people from using it as entertainment, but generally people who do that are viewed the same way as people who try to prevent people from engaging in any other form of entertainment that they'd like to participate in. Having sex for fun may be a "waste of time". It may have some dangers associated with it, much like hunting or driving a car, or most other activities.
As for one-man-one-woman, unbreakable marriage, we know that this system works, at least to some extent. We also have seen people who grew up with other systems do well. Randomly claiming that one is better without citing any reasonable data to support your claim is just ridiculous.
(I'm quite suspicious that being married or not being married plays all that major a role in the development of someone's kids minds, just because it doesn't constantly impinge on someone's mind all day and doesn't really impact the experiences that said kid has all that much. But that's just a guess.)
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
In fact, they use this very case as a demonstration for more than half of the book.
They mention that the allele is virtually non-existent outside of Northern Europe, and cite this as the most plausible explanation: For PBS to be calling this "new" seems almost fraudulent.
For the people questioning the mutation's negative effects; having CCR5-delta32 means that you have no CCR5 on the surface of your white blood cells.
Not really, that is too simplistic. You leave out some critical factors. Many mammalian societies make use of grand parents and older relatives in order to insure the continuity of the community. The societies start to fragment and go down hill once those influences are removed. Applies to humans as well, IMO. For instance, take elephants, it is hard for younger mothers to go off and feed all the time without having the older auntie elephants watch and guard the young ones. The species itself is in danger if there's too much stress on the still child bearing years members. Part of the genetic makeup, that gives the evolutionary advantage, is precisely this "caring for the young" DNA imprint pattern that actually *cares for the young* with the older members, and the older members *have to be there* for this evolutionary advantage to be effective. If you bork out one generation of the older ones the entire group starts to decline, which in the long term might wipe out the species, even if the genetic code stayed intact,with no adequate care for the young if the elders are absent, then the young have too many opportunities to not make it to childbearing age and the raw numbers slip into decline.
It's become increasingly popular, as it sounds like it should be Latin.
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
That was my first thought, for a change the AC was useful and I'd give him points if I could. I think it was an episode of Nova or something, they found an isolated community in Britain where half of the town had survived a plague outbreak, and had then not seen a lot of migration since, so they could test the descendants of the survivors.
They tested the people whose ancestors had lived, and it turned out that you could have three situations: If you did not have this mutated gene, you would die. If you had inherited it from one parent, you would get very sick, but survive. If you had inherited it from both parents you wouldn't get the black plague at all.
They talked about how the plague spread, and the areas where it had hit most often over the past couple thousand years (there's evidence of it sweeping through Europe in the dark ages) had the highest incidence of this delta-32 gene, and so would have a higher percentage of the population immune to it. They estimated that up to 14% of Europeans had this gene and if they were right, that same number would also be completely uninfectable by HIV. They didn't speculate as to what would happen to the people who were partially immune to the plague, but we hear of people who are infected with HIV and 10-15 years later haven't developed AIDS symptoms.
I brought the documentary to the attention of the HIV researchers at my office, and they said there wasn't an easy method of introducing that gene into people affected by this. I know people who work at Genzyme, they use genetic samples to grow new skin cells for burn victims and new cartilage for knee surgeries. It's not completely out of the realm of possibility that they could figure out a way to grow some white blood cells to match the patient, but with that delta 32 gene introduced. It's unlikely that they'll work it out sooner than 10-20 years from now, though, so it's science fiction until then.
-jpowers
Right, this isn't "news" by any means! There has been a documentary (PBS, I believe) about the Delta-32 mutation and its potential to prevent AIDS... HIV works in a very similar way to "Black Death"; there is essentially a "hole" in the cell membrane of white blood cells. Both viruses target the white blood cells, weakening the body's immune system. The documentary told several stories of people who somehow managed to not catch the plague. For example, there was an outbreak of the plague in a small village. It was quarantined. When officials returned 3 years after the outbreak, they were astounded to find that one man (the mortician!) was still alive. Genetic tests on people believed to be this man's descendants revealed the presence of this Delta-32 mutation. Other evidence suggested that having just one copy of this mutation could still be useful. There was a story of a woman recovering from the Black Death, something that was remarkable. She was believed to have just one copy of the mutation, therefore a partial ability to fight off the disease. I found the entire thing very interesting :)
Hmmm. Immaturity found on Slashdot. News at 11.
Dude, if everyone in the Russian prison has a pennicillin immune TB infection, and a prisoner is released into the general population as a carrier, you will be concerned. As the PBS show stated, people in New York have been diagnosed with that strain of T.B., and have died from it because it is almost untreatable.
v +russian+prison+population+penicillin+resistant+&b tnG=Search&meta=
http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=site%3Acdc.go
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
Every method has two failure rates. There is the ideal rate that the manufacturer likes, and the actual real-world rate. People store condoms in hot glove compartments, squish them in wallets, yank them out of the package, put them on with contaminated hands... all in violation of the instructions.
What do you think the social bonding is for? Just because?
It's for survival of the children. Social bonding encourages a man to provide support.
Heh, we could evolve back the other way because of modern DNA testing and child support laws.
Those who don't grow up on a 2-parent family are more-likely to have all sorts of trouble, like jail.
BTW, the modern technology mostly doesn't work too well. You can go to extremes of course, with the removal of various body parts, but that isn't what people are trying to rely on.
It reduces the risk of prostate cancer.
Catholic priests, despite the occasional pervert in the news, generally avoid ejaculation. They have a prostate cancer risk that is 3 times higher than normal.
Getting rid of old sperm is probably good too. New sperm probably works better, but you need to get rid of the old sperm somehow.
Yet more proof that English was created by a fleet of drunk monks.
Etymology: Latin, venom, poisonous emanation; akin to Greek ios poison, Sanskrit visa; in senses 2 & 4, from New Latin, from Latin
If virus were directly transcribed from latin, the proper plural would be virii, but because English is composed of 85% German, 65% Latin, and 25% French, at least 50% of it must be butchered.
I wouldn't consider the mad hatter mad. Just reality impaired. He sure can make a mean cup of tea.
Let's not forget:
Now, maybe you should get punished, but that isn't the point.
The point is that you probably will get disease. Never mind if you are deserving or not, and never mind if it is punishment (from God?) or just something awful that happens randomly.
This is simple really. If you have sex with lots of different people, sooner or later you will get some horrible diseases. Therefore, unless you are really stupid and stubborn, you won't have sex with lots of different people. I don't need to invoke moral judgement to explain this.
This has been known about for years, mainly because of a pattern amounts gay men in the USA who slept with a lot of HIV positive people that didn't contract HIV how had family from Europe who survived the black death.
SFIA. It prevents the HIV virus from entering white blood cells which are the initial vectors for HIV. (The hijacked white blood cells then go on to transport HIV into other parts of the body that it couldn't normally penetrate)
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
I have two partners. They are my life partners. I live with both of them. I want to stay with them for the rest of my life.
I did that for a while (I'm a guy, though), I really felt at peace. Then the other male got very possessive and started a bunch of shit. I eventually left because I didn't want my home life to become a competition that I either won or lost. I've been in many relationships (before and since) and none felt as good as that one did. I wish you luck.
As such, there is the fringe science regarding whether AIDS is really AIDS (i.e. HIV). I know people don't want to even talk about this, but it is helpful to find further confirmation of the HIV-AIDS link.
So, do people with this genetic HIV immunity not get AIDS?
Thank you
I seem to remember syphilis being a relativley recent introduction, like in the last 2-3000 years, might partly explain the shift towards monogamy.(Aside from treating basc human urges as evil to controll people.)
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
nice try slashdot! i'm finding less mainstream media places to be of much more value.
Besides, you've shifted the argument. A couple devoted to each other is not the same as a family. I was the oldest of 4 children, the last my mother had by another father. Now, back to your research, care to share any of it so if you interpreted it correctly others can benefit from it, and if you didn't interpret it correctly, you can be shown the error of your ways, and by extension, others can be shown the error of theirs?
This is in no way redunandant. The mod was way off base. Do your Stuff.
... come on, how someone who reads /. on Saturday night
can get an STD ?
Why is this making news again? I saw a documentary on it on the discovery channel ages ago.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Hm,
the article linked to is complee bullshit.
"Black Death" is caused by a bacterium. Not by a virus like HIV. A bacterium is of similar sice like a whie blood cell, so how shouold it be able to enter it? The articel claims that.
BTW, when you google for the "true" research results you figure that the gene mutation only helps against HIV, and mice who have the same genes are in no way resistent to plague.
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I didn't know. After reading your comment I went sniffing around and found some fascinating stuff about the practise you describe. Very absorbin' reading. I am in your debt, not only for the correction, but for a pointer to interesting history. Thank you!
I'm replying to my own post just to say a general "thank you" to all the fascinating replies from people who know more about this than I do.
Thank you for the correction!
Can I rescue my point a bit, by arguing that the bacteria have evolved in a straight line, whereas we are the result of a gene group that has taken sharp turns at many points, changed its target niche and preferred skill set many times?
In other words, people are like a system that keeps getting redesigned and adapted to base purposes that change all the time, from when the system was a vole ("let's be great at keeping quiet in the day and sneaking around at night") to when the system was an anthropoid ("let's be great at social coordination and who gives a damn about how much noise we make").
On the other hand, the bacteria are like a system which sticks to the same base purpose and just keeps refining and refining, replacing Bacteria Version 22.3.5.98 with Bacteria Version 22.3.5.99 and so forth.
In human engineering, systems that have their purposes re-adapted a lot are usually more fragile, more jury-rigged, and have more quirky leftovers than those that do not. Could this be true also of biological systems?
In your linguistic analogy, what we would be doing is comparing medieval church Latin to medieval French. Not sure what we'd conclude, though...
I'm not sure how recent this news, because I've been aware of it for close to 4 years now and I'm a layman.
i>
Specifically, and someone disturbingly it came to my attention while watching a show about homosexual subcultures on the CBC (Canadian Broadcastin Corporation). One thing it featured was a group of men who actively were trying to become infected with H.I.V. in order to die some sort of "warriors homosexual death." They wanted to embraced and were proud to eventually die from AIDS. They thought of themselves as martyrs or something.
The thing was, they featured this one guy who had slept with no less than 10 postively tested, certifiably infected men. They all had H.I.V. but this man, after sleeping with 10 of them, was still not infected with the virus. He appeared to be immune from it.
From that point on they dug into how HIV actually derived in some fashion from the Black Death, and how the actual process of an H.I.V. infection takes place exactly in the same manner the plague infected individuals. As a result, those whose families never caught the plague, their decsendants would also seem to be immune from H.I.V... much like this odd fellow from the TV show.
Anyways, this isn't new news. Or if it suddenly is news, it has been common knowledge among certain circles for some time now.
I'm from Kansas. I'm not allowed to believe in this new-fangled evolution mumbo jumbo. I'm supposed to believe that an intelligent designer planned all this out. However no one is allowed to tell me who this intelligent designer might be. Hmmmm......
Wouldn't getting a bone marrow transplant from someone with two copies of the gene let your body fight off the disease?
...it was a joke against Christian zealots...!!!
The plural is Virums.