First Phase of AIDS Vaccine Trials Successful

rbarreira writes "Xinhua online is reporting on the success of the first trial phase of an AIDS vaccine, which was started on March 2005. From the article: '"Forty-nine healthy people who received the injection showed no severe adverse reactions after 180 days, proving the vaccine was safe," said Zhang Wei, head of the pharmaceutical registration department of the SFDA. "The recipients appeared immune to the HIV-1 virus 15 days after the injection, indicating the vaccine worked well in stimulating the body's immunity," he told the press conference.' After the results are further analyzed, 800 more voluntaries may be needed for the second and third phases of the vaccine's trial."

Comments

49 people + 180 days = proof??

[lecithin]

"Forty-nine healthy people who received the injection showed no severe adverse reactions after 180 days, proving the vaccine was safe,"

Okay, success is good, but...

This is not proof. It isn't even close to it.

How long was Fen Phen tested? Thimerosal? RotaShield? Whoops.

I hope that this does work but stating that the vaccine has been prooven safe is very misleading.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[SengirV]

Birth defects anyone? Some proof there alright.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[jeremymiles]

Yeah, safe as in "Forty nine healthy people who went up in a space shuttle came back home fine, which proves it's safe".

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[WilliamSChips]

I think that even with birth defects a cure for AIDS would be useful.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[debilo]

I think that even with birth defects a cure for AIDS would be useful.

Plus, for all we know, most males lack a uterus.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Kitten Killer]

That's why this is a Phase I trial.

Drug trials go through three phases, the first of which consists of a very small number of subjects. It's essentially the first time the drug is used on humans and to see it doesn't have immediate, obvious side effects not observed in animal trials. The 2nd and 3rd phases continue to monitor safety while attempting to determine the efficacy of the drug.

Keep in mind, that a lot of the recalled drugs, such as the COX2 inhibitors like Vioxx, don't show negative side effects until your trial goes into hundreds or thousands of subjects. And even then, the drugs are continually monitored after their release to look for effects that might be present only in 0.1% even or 0.001% of the population

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Anonymous Coward]

Plus, how do they test immunity? And what about other strains of HIV (HIV-2, HIV-3, etc)?

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Anonymous Coward]

Plus, how do they test immunity?

The subjects engage in sex! Lots of sex! With random people. For science of course.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[ichigo 2.0]

Take a blood sample and see if there's HIV antibodies. Don't know about other strains, but hopefully they're similar enough so the vaccine also gives immunity against them.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Jahz]

Anybody who has taken a statistics course should have laughed at the (wording of the) claim in this post. A 49 person sample isnt supposed to prove that a drug is safe. It's meant to prove that it didnt kill or severly damage 49 people. Think about if one of these people had died as a direct result of taking this vaccine. It would be stopped the research right there with *minimal* loss of life. Now if the first test was on 800 people (like the second test will be), it might have killed 16 people. The sample size will continue to increase methodically in conjunction with the researchers statictical confidence level.

This is also why some drugs get through the testing hurdles and still manage to kill/harm thousands of people. Even when the statistical formulae work out, there is still the chance that the result was due, in part, to randomness in the population. Consider that 100 is 99.99% of 1,000,000...

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[RsG]

most males lack a uterus.

And the rest got theirs on ebay?

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[AusIV]

I think that even with birth defects a cure for AIDS would be useful.

There's a difference between a vaccine and a cure. If you could cure someone of AIDS and give their immediate descendants of some minor birth defects, that might be worthwhile. But a vaccination is something that would be given to everyone in order to prevent them from getting HIV in the first place. This being the case, birth defects are definitely not an acceptable consequence.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[antifoidulus]

In this case detecting HIV antibodies could very well prove useless. The body may develop HIV antibodies from the vaccine and still not have HIV. You have to measure viral load in the blood, which can be quite tricky.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a proof. They've been humping harlots off the streets and survived the test :>

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[7Prime]

You can be SURE that this had been done previously. This is just phase 1 of the HUMAN trial. There were probably hundreds of smaller tests done previously, on various lab animals, human blood samples, etc. They only start human trials when they know, to a certain extent, that there is a very low risk of infection or death due to the vaccine.

This is VERY promising. Just think about it... HIV is an INCURABLE disease, which kills %100 of it's victims. As of now, 49 people out of 49, were infected with HIV and didn't catch it. It may just be preliminary results, but this is very very good. There are millions dieing on a contant south-east of ours, of whome this vaccine will save. I'm suprised that it's taken a year and a half for the reports of phase 1 to move along. I hope that Phases 2 and 3 are MUCH MUCH shorter. I would expect them to have a moral obligation to get this thing through the system as quickly as possible. Hell, even if it outright KILLED 10% of patients, remember that about 50% of people in Africa have AIDS and are going to die... those are MUCH better odds.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[jmccay]

Has everyone forgotten that this is China? The truth & reality is not really gaurenteed. How do we know this is for real? All media is controled by the Communist government. Seriously, how do we know this isn't an attempt to get some type of power in future (& possibly current) trade deals?
      If they can get a vaccine for aids, vaccinate the important people in Chinese society and a certain percentage of the population, they could try and use aids as either a bioweapon in war or against their own people to solve their population problem.
      We don't even know if this is for real? Has anyone outside of China verified these claims? I for one am not swallowing this magic pill of a story. I am also not going to be in line when they hand it out. I want a better solution to the AIDS problem as much as anyone else, but I really don't believe this story.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[daftcyborg]

Just wondering, who will volunteer for the next phase of the trial? who would volunteer for the first phase? I don't know about you guys, but I'm not so sure I'd want live aids virus injected in me, even if I had "potential immunity".

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Turakamu]

This being the case, birth defects are definitely not an acceptable consequence.

Tell that to the gay community.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Anonymous Coward]

If it is "birth effects if given to a pregnant woman", then she can just wait until after she gives birth to receive it. If it is "birth effects to any child conceived afterwards" than it just might be back to the drawing board.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[SP33doh]

i'm sitting here drinking orange juice, and I don't have cancer. conclusion: orange juice prevents cancer! it's clearly proof!

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[jazir1979]

Did you RTFA?

'"The HIV-1 specific cells injected into the recipients were the DNA fragments of the virus which don't cause infection," he told Xinhua.'

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Crudely_Indecent]

The part that bothers me is that there were 49 people.

Lets take a look at that again. FOURTY-NINE! Not Fifty. Why the odd number? Maybe there were 50 and they're just not telling us about that last person. The unfortunate soul who represents that (possibly) 2% of us just isn't mentioned.

Why 49? Because telling us about all 50 would probably turn our stomachs.

Or is this just a publicity stunt?

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[NRO826]

Hell, even if it outright KILLED 10% of patients, remember that about 50% of people in Africa have AIDS and are going to die... those are MUCH better odds.

Youre probably going to have a hard time getting more volunteers for larger studies then if you kill 10% of them

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[TheoMurpse]

Consider that 100 is 99.99% of 1,000,000...

What a laughable suggestion: 100 is merely 0.01 percent of one million.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[7Prime]

Not if they have a 50% chance of dieing anyway. And I wasn't talking about a "study", I was talking about it actually being put to use. If this vaccine is thrown out or put on hold because it kills 10% of patience, this will be a real shame (not to mention, unethical), because it means a 90% chance of people living in some regions where only 50% of them have a chance. Sometimes I feel the only reason trial phases go on is because researchers are covering their own arses. We could be out there saving people right now, and then perfecting the vaccine as we go. Right now... PEOPLE ARE DIEING. They're going to die anyway. At least give them a chance!

BTW: Does this work on people who have contracted HIV, but where it hasn't turned into AIDS yet?

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Anonymous Coward]

Or maybe they could only get 49 people to volunteer to be injected with an untested HIV vaccine.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[955301]

Nah, Russian bride magazines...

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[daeg]

Or the elderly community. 27% of those in the US living with HIV are over 50 and they are the fastest growing group of new HIV cases [ http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/08/18/eveningn ews/main1913646.shtml ]

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Anonymous Coward]

> Tell that to the gay community.

Thank you! Finally, someone who gets it.

I'm a lesbian. I also have an immune system/skin condition called psoriasis. I've spent the last eight years fighting with different doctors for the chance to try new treatments when they become available.

"This drug causes birth defects so women of child-bearing age..."
"I'm a lesbian."
"Yes, but while you are of child-bearing age I'm not comfortable prescribing..."
"Lesbian. Leeeeeeeeesbian."
"Yes, I understand, but while there is a possibility of your becoming pregnant..."

Certain rules do not apply to certain groups. I wish more medical doctors had the reasoning capacity that you have.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Vellmont]

But a vaccination is something that would be given to everyone in order to prevent them from getting HIV in the first place. This being the case, birth defects are definitely not an acceptable consequence.

That's probbably true in developed countries like the US where HIV infection rates are somewhere around 0.60% of the population. But in a country like Swaziland where 38% of the population has HIV, or South Africa where 21% of the population has HIV it'd be a very different story.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[FormOfActionBanana]

Phase I drugs trials are given to healthy human subjects. They shouldn't have any viruses in their blood.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Chowderbags]

Or we could save everyone trouble and kill everyone with AIDS, right? Then no one would die and no one would ever get AIDS again! Nevermind that it is an exceedingly difficult ethical question to essentially condemn 10% of the people to death (your scenario) through no fault of their own, when simply educating them about proper condom use (oh the horror!) would kill no one *and* prevent the vast majority of AIDS cases (over 99%), all without any real ethical concerns.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[prencher]

Where's the signup form again?

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Shads]

Vaccine's don't cure, they prevent, this won't help the people with pre-existing infection. However, if the trials go well and governments can be persuaded to deal with it like we dealt with small pox, tb, etc this can be something humanity, for the most part, will prevent the vast majority of the world from ever having to deal with inside a few generations and in the long run may even help to find a cure.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[SnowZero]

Why not give it to all men, and women who can no longer have children? You can go back to the drawing board for young women, but it would be dumb to throw away a 70% solution to a problem...

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Chowderbags]

Is it just me, or is it bad that the person directing all this can't remember that HIV doesn't have DNA? It only has two copies of single stranded RNA. For that matter, HIV doesn't come in cells, because it's a virus. I *really* don't want anything to do with this vaccine until it's been tested many times with large samples by independent scientists.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Shads]

People value their own lives to much to take that level of risk.

You're 100% healthy, find a mythical 10 shot revolver, load 9 chambers with blanks and one with a real bullet, give the chamber a spin and put it to your head and pull the trigger. If you get shot, tough shit. If you don't get shot, then you can't die by putting a gun to your head and pulling the trigger ever in your life no matter how many times you try.

Not many people would make that choice. AIDS for most people engaging in consentual sex is entirely preventable. It's NOT a particularly robust virus or particularly contagious compared to most viruses like it. Honestly, at a 10% mortality rate for 99% of people in the world, you'd be absolutely insane to take it.

HIV(Human Immunodeficiency Virus) is not AIDS(Acquired ImmunoDeficiency Syndrome), HIV weakens the immune system, at some point in most cases this eventually causes the body to get certain other infections and to be unable to fight them off... These secondary infections and the effects are AIDS. This vaccine is going to target HIV to prevent the initial assault on the immune system, by doing this you prevent AIDS also.

If you read the article you'll note that this prevents HIV-1, not AIDS itself which is a secondary effect of HIV. So no, this will have no effect on those already infected, vaccines prevent-- not cure.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Anonymous Coward]

It's all right, mate. They just test it on Falun Gong prisoners presumably.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[gnarlin]

I'm a lesbian. I also have an immune system/skin condition called psoriasis. I've spent the last eight years fighting with different doctors for the chance to try new treatments when they become available.

Perhaps I could offer you some advice.
The reason for the doctors hesitation to prescribe you the experimental medicin is due to their danger of being liable for the side effects of those drugs that have not been officially aproved by the FDA, even if you acknowledge the danger of said effects.

Go talk to a lawyer and have him/her/it draft a letter of legal absolution from liability which you can offer the reluctant doctors in exchange for their cooperation.
Basically, they are just covering their own asses when they are denying you those drugs. Good luck.

Also, I think that the slashdotting community would probably not be adverse to you writing down some of your romantic exploits. In fact that's probably what the slashdot's journal was made for: Hot lesbian love ;-)

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Jafafa Hots]

I don't know many people in the gay community that would consider millions of children born with birth defects to be an acceptable trade-off.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[jazir1979]

It may have been simplification for the purposes of the article, since DNA is a familiar term to readers but RNA might not be. Not necessarily the right thing to do, but unfortunately pretty common in scientific news articles that are aimed at the general public.

As for the cells, they probably injected infected cells into recipients, which is exactly what the article says. It didn't say HIV-1 cells it said HIV-1 specific cells.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, I think that the slashdotting community would probably not be adverse to you writing down some of your romantic exploits. In fact that's probably what the slashdot's journal was made for: Hot lesbian love ;-)

Mod parent UP!!!!!!

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[dr_dank]

Also, I think that the slashdotting community would probably not be adverse to you writing down some of your romantic exploits. In fact that's probably what the slashdot's journal was made for: Hot lesbian love ;-)

Allow me to correct you: hot, flaky, & itchy lesbian love.

Addressing the serious topic brought by AC: Even though you are a lesbian, you are still physically capable of having a baby. Clinics do that kind of thing for same sex couples all the time. The absolution letter recommended by the OP is a good idea. The doctor is only protecting him/herself in case your parter do decide to bear children and are entitled to a free bag of money if it comes out looking like Screech from Saved By The Bell.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Namlak]

Leeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesbian

And you've never heard of lesbian couples (or even lesbian singles) having children via in vitro fertilization? You've never heard of women of "child bearing age" changing their minds about reproducing as their "time" comes to and end? Do you think this might be what the doctor is being cautious about?

Your comment is stupid. Stuuuuuuuuuupid.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[joshetc]

There would be no reason to go back to the drawing board.

All men take the vaccine
All women unable to have children take the vaccine
All lesbians no longer interested in having children have surgury to make it not possible, take the vaccine

Who is left to give AIDs to these young women? Unless these young straight women have sex with each other we are pretty much good.

Reguardless I could see the vaccine going away or greatly reducing after a vaccine is public, see any other disease or virus that was widespread once and is now almost impossible to find even if you arent vaccinated.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[everett]

You want a better solution to the AIDS/HIV problem?

Don't have sex, share needles or get blood transfusions (claim to be a Jehovah`s Witness if necessary)

qed

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[7Prime]

Well, a cure is only temporary if everyone is required to, and able to take the vaccination. The way it's looking now, AIDS suppressing drugs are getting good enough that in a few decades, it will be able to keep people alive and moderately healthy until they die of old age anyway. And by that time, if this vaccine works out and is properly administered, there will be no new cases to "cure". Many times, funding for cures dies when a prevention is found... I was hoping we would find a cure FIRST, because usually preventative menthods are cheeper, and will still be researched well after a cure is found... but how it's looking right now, if the vaccine works out, and you currently have HIV, you're pretty much fucked... except that, again, AIDS supressing drugs are getting better and better each year. People are starting to live decades with HIV without getting AIDS, now. Unfortunately, this success is only seen in developed nations, and mostly within people who can afford state-of-the-art medication. I can't begin to imagine the difficulty in maintaining health insurance if you have HIV.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Anonymous Coward]

Vaccine's don't cure

No, but using an apostrophe for plurals should-- with the death penalty. It's the only cure for stupidity.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Jahz]

Consider that 100 is 99.99% of 1,000,000...

What a laughable suggestion: 100 is merely 0.01 percent of one million.

Excuse me, sometimes I don't proofread. That should read p(.9999), which I think should be obvious as p(.99) is not something I would like to see on a medication bottle.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Anonymous Coward]

Or we could save everyone trouble and kill everyone with AIDS, right?

that should have been done in the 80s, but if it wipes out most of Africa and Asia, it's fine with me.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Anonymous Coward]

Gay people typically don't have children you stupid fuck.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[penrodyn]

There is no proof in science only disproof. One cant even prove that asprin helps with a headache let alone an AID vacine.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[dhasenan]

It's a frikkin vaccine. If it works, they WILL have HIV antibodies soon after the vaccine is administered.

Another way to test is to take a blood sample and try infecting it with HIV. If you can infect the sample, then the vaccine failed. Since there are common tests, it should be a simple matter.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[kemo_by_the_kilo]

49 people is a bit odd what happened to the 50th?

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure the PhD and MDs working on this are aware of that as well as quite a bit more, and don't need a slashdot opinion.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Kitten Killer]

Anybody who has taken an English course should have laughed at the (wording of the) claim that what I said:

"to see it doesn't have immediate, obvious side effects not observed in animal trials"

to be equal to what he said:

"to prove that a drug is safe"

Thanks for stuffing those words in my mouth.
PS. I've taken both statistic and epidemiology and I'm a microbiologist.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[DrKyle]

You know just enough to ask questions, but not enough to answer them yourself. If they are looking for the HIV antigens to be expressed in the body for a period of time they might inject bacteria which are producing that protein and putting it out into the body to recognize. Also, if you are making a transgenic vaccine of this kind you want the expression from those cells to be stable, thus they will have DNA copies of the gene, not just RNA. I'm sure they know what they are doing.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Kitten Killer]

They used DNA because RNA is not suitable here. RNA is highly unstable, even in the lab.

Remember that HIV is a RETROvirus. It retro-transcribes itself back into DNA (and thus allowing for genomic integration). So, in a way, HIV does have DNA.

As for the "cells" thing, this was told to Xinhua news agency, which means the conversation was likely in Chinese, and somewhere things got lost in translation.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Score Whore]

Just think about it... HIV is an INCURABLE disease, which kills %100 of it's victims.

Does it? Seriously. That's a pretty big claim. You could make the same claim of diabetes. No cure. Without treatment you will die from it. But nobody thinks of it as a fatal condition. AIDS may well become something similar. Look at Magic Johnson, been diagnosed with HIV for 15 years. As far as anyone knows he is quite healthy. Given the way things look for him, at 47 years old he is more likely to die of old age than HIV/AIDS complications.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[idonthack]

27% of those in the US living with HIV are over 50 and they are the fastest growing group of new HIV cases

Thanks for the mental image :(

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Anonymous Coward]

And being born with AIDS is what, winning the baby lottery?

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Forge]

Personaly I would scrible the priscription along with a tubaligation apointment. If I didn't think she was sincear.

AC from parent would it bother you to take that permanent contraceptive?

If it would. Why?

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[E 99]

HIV is an INCURABLE disease, which kills %100 of it's victims. As of now, 49 people out of 49, were infected with HIV and didn't catch it. It may just be preliminary results, but this is very very good.

I'll probably be accused (again) of being pendantic, but I'm sorry, HIV does not kill 100% (or %100) of its victims. Some die in car accidents and others die of heart attacks, etc. And since most people worldwide with HIV are druggies, (not that there's anything wrong with druggies... I have to remember where I'm posting) I bet a lot die from drug overdoses. And holy crap, I know it's China, but they didn't expose the test subjects to HIV to see if they became infected!! (Typically, researchers would take a blood sample, and expose the sample to the virus, and measure the immune response in the vial of blood.)

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[StikyPad]

Consider that 100 is 99.99% of 1,000,000...

I'll file that next to my idea of "12 inches".

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[gooberguy25]

wheres Kinsley when you need him?

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Jaysyn]

Don't forget the small percent of the population that is effectively immune to HIV.

Jaysyn

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Anonymous Coward]

Insightful? I don't think so.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Mr. Freeman]

Unless the birth defects are worse than the effects of the AIDS virus. Heck, any birth defects are probably worse than the AIDS virus. How would you like to grow up with birth defect X because your parents got some vaccine which really isn't necessary if you just avoid having sex with people you don't know/trust/are married to? Not to say that abstinence is a magic bullet, but given the choice between don't have sex with someone or risk giving birth to a mentally challenged child, I'd choose the former.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[netdur]

hey, if you are in NYC, my friend is famous skin docotor... he is... er... mail me netdur.gmail@com

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[ceoyoyo]

Yes, remember, this is China, hell bent on world domination. Onward comrades!

It's not like any other large nations (or the companies that run them) would withhold life saving treatments from those in need of them to gain economic advantages....

Never fear, a new vaccine will have to be approved by your own FDA with an FDA monitored and approved trial. If the Chinese decide to charge you a premium for it, well, it serves you right.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[something_wicked_thi]

Not necessarily. A vaccine could be useful even if it causes birth defects as long as it doesn't cause *genetic* defects in the offspring because then, we could vaccinate all males, for example. That would help quite a bit because it would prevent aids from being transmitted via heterosexual and gay intercourse, leaving only lesbian and non-intercourse methods of transmission (and, I believe that woman-to-woman transmission is a lot more difficult than the other forms). I think that could go a very long way in stopping the AIDS epidemic in Africa.

Whether the African people would use AIDS vaccines is an entirely separate issue of which I am both unqualified and reluctant to speak.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[ceoyoyo]

Birth defects aren't very likely with a vaccine. Drugs, yes, but vaccines, not really. You'd have to accidently give a mother immunity to something very specific in a fetus. The usual risks with a vaccine are triggering an autoimmune disease or causing the very disease you're trying to prevent.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Shaklee39]

My penis is very large

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[something_wicked_thi]

I should also add that lesbians could also get it for fairly obvious reasons. That leaves the only woman-to-woman transmission vector being bisexual women or women who have one-off lesbian experiences.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[shird]

You may not intend to get pregnant, but what if you were raped? and what if you then got pregnant, and were against abortion? Then you would be bringing a potentially deformed child into the world, which could have been avoided.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[swelke]

...and in the long run may even help to find a cure.

In the long run, a vaccine is a cure. Oh, did you mean the 20 year projected lifespan of those now infected? I'm not sure I'd call 20 years long run as far as scientific progress goes.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[goodie3shoes]

"Also, I think that the slashdotting community would probably not be adverse to you writing down some of your romantic exploits. In fact that's probably what the slashdot's journal was made for: Hot lesbian love ;-)" Nice going. We finally get a poster that's not a 29-year-old socially-challenged white male living in his parent's basement, and you have to reinforce the "men are pigs" stereotype. Now there's only 3 women that read Slashdot. BTW, you mean "averse" not "adverse".

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[hellanacho]

nope, don't know where your geting .9999 from, i'm also getting .01

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[sumdumass]

Doesn't even have to be against abortion. What if the rape scenario revolves around some drug induced daze (unintentional or not). Then after knowing your a lesbian, the doctor explores other reasons for simptoms or maybe they never appeare until after the baby is in a stage that isn't legal to abort. I'm also wondering it someone having lesbian sex after regular sex could transfer some of the juices(sperm) and effectivly impregnate the other girl? They say it can live for three or more days in there.

Some areas of the country don't allow abortions after certain stages of development. Some might but only when certain health risks are present. Some areas don't care if you kill the kid at all before it is born. Some places will let you kill it before born only if the mother consents, If it is done without her consent, it is considered murder or some muder related activity (like vehicular homicide if you cause an unborn child to dies even if it is of abortion age). Even stranger is a requirement to have a funeral for an unborn fetus after it enters a certain stage of development. Even if it was aborted. And if you really want to get bizzare, some people are arguing the father of the child can demand the woman gets an abortion while attmepting to get out of parental obligations if it doesn't happen.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[sumdumass]

I'm a man and i'm not goign to take the vaccine. I will also fight any requirments to take the vaccine before attending schools or anything else.

AIDS/HIV isn't cominicable outside of specificly defined decisions that shouldn't be present when attending schools. It isn't something casual contact can transmit. It should be an elective proceedure. Take it if you want but don't fo

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes they do assfuck. It is how they indoctrinate more gay people into the system. Geeze, without having thier own kids to turn gay, they would have to become scout leaders, teachers, or some other person of interest to kids. It isn't like they are born that way or anything.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[TrevorB]

I hate to be a dick *cough*, but have you considered getting your tubes tied?

It's much much more intrusive than the equivelant for us males (lucky us), but if it's critical for your health...

No, I take this all back. This is intensely stupid. That level of intrusiveness is through the roof.

Try another doctor. Or another health care system (Move to Canada! It's great up here. :)

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[saridder]

They can't even cure athlete's foot. Forget about curing AIDS.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Anonymous Coward]

He wasn't stuffing words in your mouth. The summary made the "proves the drug is safe" claim. Someone disputed that that proves anything, and you claimed he was wrong. So either your post was irrelevant, or you were in support of the "proves the drug is safe" claim.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Anonymous Coward]

Because dying from excessive blood loss is much better than taking a very small chance of contracting HIV.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for providing a bibliography!! (seriously, mod's up to ya!)

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Anonymous Coward]

The vaccine for Hepatitis B is known to be good for 10 years. Why? Because that's how long they've been testing it for. Thus, we can safely say that this vaccine is good for 180 days.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[ceoyoyo]

They were testing an experimental AIDS vaccine on humans for the first time. Perhaps you'd like to volunteer to be the 50th?

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[__aajfby9338]

Shads wrote: You're 100% healthy, find a mythical 10 shot revolver, load 9 chambers with blanks and one with a real bullet, give the chamber a spin and put it to your head and pull the trigger.

Sigh. Following those directions would likely be fatal whether the live cartridge or one of the blanks landed under the hammer. For example, actor Jon-Erik Hexum accidentally killed himself by firing a blank against his head with a prop gun on the set of some crappy TV show in the 80's.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Kadin2048]

It's not like any other large nations (or the companies that run them) would withhold life saving treatments from those in need of them to gain economic advantages....

What, this surprises you? Human life has always been cheap when it comes to the scale of nations. People have empathy for each other; I've yet to see anything that demonstrates such feelings from abstract legal constructs.

If the situation ever came down to one of actual perceived cultural survival, I have no doubt that all the feel-good welfare states of the Western hemisphere would be sending out smallpox-laced blankets to the teeming masses of the Third World, if they thought that would somehow increase their own chances for survival; not only as individuals, but as a coherent civilization.

People as individuals are capable of surprising ruthlessness when threatened, and groups of people (where individuals can spread responsibility for decisions among the group) even more so.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Per Wigren]

Take it if you want but don't fo

Was that one of those jokes where you pretend getting disconnected or dying in the middle of posting?

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[ceoyoyo]

It doesn't surprise me, I was pointing out to the original poster that China trying to make a buck off their AIDS vaccine would just be following in the footsteps of his (presumably) own country.

I think you're wee bit cynical though... there are lots of nations that exhibit quite a bit of altruism. My own country sends volunteers, supplies and money to pretty much any disaster in any nation in the world, including a famous hurricane last year in the US. Many nations also lend their soldiers to the UN for peacekeeping missions where they get nothing in return but the occasional dead soldier. I'm not talking about things like Iraq, but rather places like Cyprus. Also, recently we've started lending members of our police force out to help train police in countries like Haiti.

There's a difference between choosing your own survival over someone else's and choosing to put yourself out slightly to help.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Rix]

drugs != vaccines

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[CEMM]

While I'm not at all belittling HIV and the horrible impact it can have on a person, life is an incurable disease which kills 100% of it's "victims". HIV is an incurable virus that can become a debilitating syndrome which makes you highly susceptible to other things which kill you, but being HIV positive, and, in some cases, even having AIDS itself is something that is becoming increasingly livable with for many years and with a high quality of life. In a lot of cases, it's not the fast death scentence it used to be.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Anonymous Coward]

If the father has opted for an abortion but the mother declines, I dont see why the father would be obligated for child support.

Arguing that the father is responsible for raising the child, but has no rights when it comes to choosing to keep the child seems wrong.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[ringbarer]

And for the imagination impaired... This!

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[x2A]

"what if I get raped" is really *not* a way to live, jeez

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[lord sibn]

First of all, the most common view, where rape is concerned, is that if you have been raped, abortion is the way to go. There is a zero chance of birth defects under these circumstances. Second, even if you do NOT seek an abortion, you can stop taking the experimental medication. Either way, the potential "birth defects" are averted.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[x2A]

except for all the kids being born with it. Vaccine won't touch that.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[the grace of R'hllor]

People do not build their lives around disaster. At least, not if they want to enjoy the ride.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[x2A]

"For example, actor Jon-Erik Hexum accidentally killed himself by firing a blank against his head with a prop gun"

That shouldn't be funny...

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[x2A]

Ya ya, people are dying, spare the emotional attacks, they're narrow minded and short sighted. What we're talking about is injecting people with a modified form of a virus that is known for the fact that it's delivery system causes genetic mutations (which is why it's so hard to kill; it keeps changing). This is potentially very dangerous stuff; you give it to everyone, and 50 years later some mutation is triggered, you wipe out the population.

You're damn right they're covering their arses, would you like to be responsible for killing a bunch of people because you overlooked something?

If you were really concerned with the numbers of people dying: if they plowed the money gone into r&d for this straight into food and water resources, they could have saved *many many* lived already. But that's not what this is about. Put the money to best use, not throw it at whatever "solution" to saving a few lives comes first. Even with this vaccine, people will die. Should you not be thinking about all these africans who could have their lives extended past hiv/aids, only to starve to death instead? We need to make things better, not just lash out in any direction whatever the cost ("hell, only kills 10% of the population...").

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Joey7F]

I think either word works http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/adverse

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[norfolkboy]

well, have your cunt cut out then?

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[TheLuggage]

You might considder the doctor isn't stupid, but simpely covers his/hers own ass...
Basicly if you have children with a birth defect you can sue the doctor.
You say you are lesbian, and i have no reason to doubt that. You say you won't have children and i have no reason to doubt that either. But I'm not the one getting sued if you lie, and do have children. Basicly as long as you are able to have children, the doctor runs the risk of getting sued...

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[grandgator]

That would actually probably do more harm than good.

1. It would fork the R&D road and dillute the present efforts at finding a universal vaccine.
2. It would shunt money into the big pharma marketing machine in the meantime.
3. It would create competition among similar products, adding unneeded confusion to a complicated situation where simplicity is very important. You don't want patients having even a little doubt or question about whether they're getting the "right" vaccine.
4. When something more universal DID come out, the competition would become even more fierce and you would end up with a more convoluted and charged atmosphere.

Vaccines have been rejected which are 99% effective in most people, or which are 100% effective in specific subsets of the population. It's because when you're dealing with 6 billion people, small percentages translate to real problems. Economies of scale are not just for server farms and the stock market.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[mirio]

What does being a lesbian have to do with having a child? A lesbian friend of mine just had a child (through AI). Rather strange situation though. Her partner has a twin brother who donated the swimmers.

Also, if you remember Dolly the sheep -- she was created without ANY male DNA. I anticipate in the future that lesbians will be able to have their partner's children through 'cloning'.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Anonymous Coward]

"And the rest got theirs on Ebay."

AIDS is one of the most preventable diseases known to man. It is hard to get unless you do certain things - needles or unsafe sex. If people keep their pants on until they know the person and did not shoot up AIDS would be vanish in a couple of decades and there would be NO NEW CASES. I can see a cure for those that have it now but a preventable vaccine is stupid.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Eivind]

Sure.

But that's partly because people are capable of basic math. A 10% chance of dying, in exchange for immunity from dying from gunshots is simply a bad deal. People living normal stable lives in western countries without war has like 1 chance in 100.000 to die by being shot by a gun.

Swapping a 0.001 % risk of death against a 10% risk of death is simply dumb.

We do make such swaps though, when the odds are in our favour. Two examples will suffice.

Immunization saves a lot of lives. It also kills a few children, makes a handful of children permanently disabled, and make many more children temporarily sick. Swapping a 1% chance of dying of say polio with a 0.0001% chance of dying from the vaccine, a 0.001% chance of being permanently harmed by the vaccine and a 1% chance of getting temporarily sick from the vaccine is by most (excluding some US nutcases basically) regarded as a good deal.

In wartimes, and shortly before, its common to up the realism-level of the training the soldiers go trough to levels where soldiers actually start dying in training. It's considered a reasonable choice nevertheless, because the more realistic training *may* kill 1/10.000 of your soliders. But it'll save a lot more lives than that once the real war starts. Have a look at the loss-numbers in training prior to the allied invasion of normandie for an example.

Similarily, there are parts of the world where vaccine agains HIV would be a benefit even if the side-effects where severe. If you live somewhere where 30% of the adult population is infected, it's probably a good deal to get vaccinated at oh say age 12, even if the vaccine say makes 10% sick for a week, 0.1% permanently harmed and 0.01% die as a result of the vaccine. If you live in a place where HIV is rare, that'd probably be a bad deal.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[szembek]

Are you saying people shouldn't have sex while going to school? I don't know about you, but getting laid while in school was great! And people do stupid shit when their young. It's such a dangerous disease; it should be vaccinated against when possible. Abstinence is not a realistic option. You can recommend it to students, but you cannot expect them to take it seriously. sex is too much fun!

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[CEMM]

And since most people worldwide with HIV are druggies, (not that there's anything wrong with druggies... I have to remember where I'm posting) I bet a lot die from drug overdoses.

That's a pretty huge generalisation you're making there. Where does that data come from? Are you taking into account the 2.3 million children under 15 (many of whom most likely contracted it through vertical transmission from an infeced mother), the people who contracted it through being raped, the people who contracted it through unscreened blood transfusions and organ transplants or through untreated blood products, the people who contracted it after accidental needle-stick injuries or accidental blood/mucous membrane contact while working in the health care professions. Sharing of needles is only one of a number of methods of transmission and while, in some countries, it may be able to be said to be a primary cause, I would be highly surprised if that was the case worldwide as you suggest. You say no offence to druggies...but what about no offence to the 38.6 million AIDS victims who have to live with this sort of stigma on top of an often debillitating illness? (Statistics Worldwide estimates found here)

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Lurker2288]

That has a lot more to do with people surviving longer with HIV than old people becoming newly infected. The first really successful HIV treatment came out in 1996, and before that, people with AIDS just didn't live long enough to become elderly. That said, an HIV vaccine probably wouldn't be given to everyone, just the most high risk people--intravenous drug users, sex workers, and men who have sex with men. Many of these people might be willing to accept the risk of birth defects for protection from a terrible, fatal disease.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[WhiteWolf666]

This doesn't prove it safe.

Would you rather see the occasional headline:

40,000 volunteer vaccine test ends in failure; 76% fatality rate.

Take a at this. That's what happens when a "Phase I" or earlier trial goes bad.

They now know that this vaccine won't immediately cause death in most cases. Now, they can continue to test it.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[WhiteWolf666]

I think what he was trying to say is that even with a 99% success rate, you'll get 100 failures in 1,000,000.

And, as you can read in his other post, even with a 99.99% success rate, you'll get 1 failure in 1,000,000.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Anonymous Coward]

"Lesbian. Leeeeeeeeesbian."


you must be new here.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Grendel Drago]

Or Larry Kramer. He's been HIV-positive for more than twenty years without developing AIDS.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Hott of the World]

Perhaps, but there are cultures where sex is the only thing there is to do. They honestly don't care if they get diseases, and it's sickening.

I wonder though, just because you were vaccinated doesn't mean you can't get pregnant/a girl pregnant. Would the baby have aids still? Seems like a pressing issue, until a "cure" is found.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[insanarchist]

Oh shit, the sniper got him! You'd better get out of here before

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[kalirion]

Hmm, what if the vaccine is sexually transmitted? Have they tested that? The bisexual community could could have and cause problems then, even if only the gay community accepts the treatment.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[infinite9]

I also have an immune system/skin condition called psoriasis

I have psoriasis. I was 40% covered. Get on enbrel. I've been on every topical treatment imaginable, none of which really worked. I had skin atrophy problems from steroids. I finally stopped all treatments because they were causing more problems than they were solving. I never wanted to risk things like methotrexate or cyclosporin. This time they nailed it. It works. No side-effects. Two injections a week I give myself. I was 100% clear in four months. It's $2400 a month, but my health insurance is covering it, so I only have a $40 copay. If your derm is giving you problems with it, find a new derm.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[MBGMorden]

It sounds strange, but I kinda agree with you there.

To require child support a father must have some say in the matter. If he asks for an abortion and the mother refuses, then she shouldn't be liable. And by the same token, if you're going to make any man pay for child support when a child is born, then the father should have some say in whether or not the abortion can take place. If the mother wants an abortion but the father does not, then the abortion should not happen with the requirement that he take full custody (and full financial responsibility) of the child upon birth.

Basically I think that if BOTH parents aren't OK with it, then abortion is a no-go. If only one wants it, then they shouldn't be responsible for the child.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[AndersOSU]

Serious question, has a vaccine ever produced a birth defect when administered to someone who wasn't pregnant at the time?

Vaccines are given as a one time (or in a single series) application. If you aren't pregnant when recieving the drug you shouldn't be able to cause developmental birth defects. Cases like Thalidomides are drugs that the woman is taking during pregnancy.

Sure there is the chance that the drug causes chromosomal damage in the eggs before fertilization, but shouldn't there be a relatively simple in vitro test for that?

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[IAmTheDave]

There's a difference between a vaccine and a cure.

Well, over a couple generations, the difference becomes less obvious. Look at Smallpox - a vaccine that - over generations, practically wiped out the disease. Yeah, it's still a threat, but a vaccine now could see a practially AIDS-free world in 50-100 years. That's not a bad thing.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[yfarren]

I wish mods would check links, before saying "informative". How about "misleading" or "lying". Oh, I know, he only inserted one itty bitty little word. Only 3 letters long.

Yea, that word was "new". What the article he is quoting SAYS is that in the USA, 27% of people with HIV are over 50. It ALSO says that some people over 50 are getting aids. No-where does it say that 27% of people with aids are GETTING it when they are over 50. To say then, that it is the largest growing sector of the population just means that people who got it in their 30's, in the 80's, are now still alive, and are turning 50.

Informative? Please. Try "deceitful".

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

I once saw a .jpeg of three guys pushing 80, umm, well, help me Jesus, my eyes, my eyes!

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[An Onerous Coward]

Immunity is tested statistically.

You find a group of high risk individuals, give some of them the vaccine and the rest get a placebo. If the vaccinated group has significantly fewer incidences of HIV, then the vaccine is at least a partial success.

So, what are the ethical implications here? Well, I lived in San Francisco this summer, and the local media had some good articles about how the testing is done. They're really careful to drive home the fact that 1) they may not have gotten the vaccine and 2) the vaccine may not protect them. They do what they can to discourage the subjects from engaging in high risk behaviors. Most important, the success of the study doesn't rely on the subjects doing anything they're not already doing.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Lurker2288]

"Basically I think that if BOTH parents aren't OK with it, then abortion is a no-go. If only one wants it, then they shouldn't be responsible for the child." Awesome. A position that the pro-lifers AND the pro-choicers can hate.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[ozziegt]

Being a lesbian doesnt mean that you automatically aren't going to have children. Maybe if you get your tubes tied they will be more inclined to help you out.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

The problem with that is you can't sign away the right of someone else to sue the doctor, namely, the damaged child.

Even if you sign away your rights when you, for example, get behind the wheel of a car, that doesn't mean whoever you cream because it's defective can't sue the car company.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

> Try another doctor. Or another health care system (Move to Canada! It's great up here. :)

Heavy socialization removes profit motive, which reduces the rate of technological development for cures and treatments. This, in turn, adds up, year after year, decade after decade, until, congratulations! You're getting "free" health care that is technologically years behind where it otherwise would have been. Net effect: The People's average life and health is actually harmed because of the socialized health care.

But it seems great, doesn't it?

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Why not? You can't get safe and effective speed-like weight-loss drugs in the US because addicts [b]might [i]illegally[/i] get ahold of them.[/b]

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

>> Gay people (blah blah blah)
>
> Yes they do assfuck.

Why yes, many of them do, in fact, assfuck. Mod -1: Redundant

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

The "no vaccine for woman who might get pregnant" is just a preventative measure until it's studied. However, it is not a chemical per se, and probably would not behave in a manner that alters cellular activity, which is the source of drugs-n-birth defects.

Something like thalidomide, which works by altering growth in fine blood vessels, probably wasn't the brightest thing to use in pregnant women. But a vaccine should be no problem.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

I'm willing to bet you could pump a vaccinated woman full of HIV, and it wouldn't affect her, and it wouldn't affect the fetus because it would be killed off before anything could statistically reach it.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[sumdumass]

Not really, It was the after effects of an old Dell laptop + XP deciding to bug out. The keyboard decided to go nutz and the trackpad moved the mouse uncontrolibly. I powered it down but it must have sent the post first.

The sentence should have read "Take it if you want but don't force it on anyone else.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Until some joker selling a book or looking for political power decides the AIDS vaccine is actually causing AIDS, or autism, or some other idiocy, that is...

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Marc2k]

For one, you can't get diabetes from wiping up someone's blood or having intimate contact with someone who either doesn't know they have it, or doesn't tell you.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Yes, of course, the exception proves the rule. :rollseyes

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[sumdumass]

Are you saying people shouldn't have sex while going to school?

No I'm saying that you have to make a concious decision to get infected in most all situations. There is no need to require someone who isn't going to become infected to submit to an unneccesary and possibly risky medical treatment.

The ethics behind a "lets stop them from hurting themselves from making bad decisions by making those decisions artificialy and unsatisfactorly safe" is misleading at best. Even if aids/hiv was completly eradicated by this vaccine, you still have teen pregnacy, syphilis, genital warts, and a host of other problems needing to be addressed. Some of wich are just as fatal. Using much of the same protective measures as you would for AIDS, you are likley to not infect yourself or anyone else with one of these diseases or conditions (including HIV/AIDS). Abstinence isn't the only option either, it is just the most effective.

Just because we put airbags in cars doesn't mean we don't need seatbelts. We also don't require medical proceedures to stop people from drinking and driving wich BTW kills more people per year then AIDS/HIV. And yes, there are drugs that can stop the body from absorbing alcohol in a way that makes it intoxicating. Why not require all bars and nightclubs to serve a drink laced with one of these drugs as the first drink. In a way, this is more sensible because intoxicating liquors impares judgment were as having sex doesn't(unless someone tries to account for people who aren't smart enough to control thier desires but then that could be a quick justification for rape or kiddie porn).

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[ProfFalcon]

I anticipate in the future that lesbians will be able to have their partner's children through 'cloning'.

Interesting. There was a movie with Julie Bowen starring with this concept as a premise. Seems men were too aggressive to be allowed to continue in the species, so they decided to only allow women to survive. Decent movie.

http://imdb.com/title/tt0193283/ - Last Man on Planet Earth

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Andrew Aguecheek]

Childbirth is not something anyone should go through if they don't want to. The man isn't going to have to go through it, he doesn't get to force the woman to.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[drinkypoo]

AIDS is one of the most preventable diseases known to man. It is hard to get unless you do certain things - needles or unsafe sex.

Or receiving a tainted blood transfusion.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[pyite]

HIV can be transmitted from the mother to baby, but only during birth where fluids might exchange. Mother and child have separate, isolated blood systems during pregnancy. If the mother is clean, so is the baby.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Anonymous Coward]

AIDS is one of the most preventable diseases known to man. It is hard to get unless you do certain things - needles or unsafe sex.

Or receiving a tainted blood transfusion.

Or being born from an infected mother. Or rape. Or participating in a clinical trial for a vaccine that turns out not to work.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Abcd1234]

The People's average life and health is actually harmed because of the socialized health care.

But it seems great, doesn't it?

I bet living in your made up fantasy world does, too.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Rocquestar]

...or maybe they started with 100, and only 49 had "no ill effects" after 180 days...

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell that to the gay community.

Why would they care about birth defects?

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[MBGMorden]

Then child support from the male parent should no longer be a requirement. If a man is to have any responsibility (especially outside of a planned pregnancy) for a child, then he should have some input as to the birth. To say otherwise is to basically dismiss his involvement.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Doctor Faustus]

AC from parent would it bother you to take that permanent contraceptive?

If it would. Why?

Because it's a fairly significant surgery (more so than a vasectomy, anyway), and there would be no benefit to her.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[x2A]

yes, and I'm willing to bet you could pump the vaccine into a woman full of HIV, and it wouldn't affect her, and it wouldn't affect the fetus because it would already have the virus too.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[x2A]

There's a huge difference between "I don't wanna give you this in case you abuse or become addicted to it", and "I don't wanna give you this in case you get raped"! I say again: jeez!

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[LunaticTippy]

So, that profit motive has given the US the finest healthcare in the world, right? And Americans have the longest life expectancy and lowest infant mortality rates too!

I've seen the profit motive impair medical progress way more than I've seen it help.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Locke2005]

You have to measure viral load in the blood, which can be quite tricky. Why is this tricky? PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) is routinely used now to multiply the viral DNA by several orders of magnitude so that it can be meaasured. I agree that measuring antibodies after a vacination is useless for determining whether or not an infection has occurred.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[LunaticTippy]

That is some depressing logic.

You seem to want people to suffer, and you seem to take pleasure from having horrible consequences handed out to people who you think deserve it.

Why stop there? We don't need medical advances for heart disease since if you eat properly and exercise you aren't likely to have trouble. We shouldn't set broken bones since careful prudent folk don't break them in the first place.

Why not have a more positive attitude? If we can cure/vaccinate against HIV it is a good thing. HPV is already well along it's way to being managed. Then we can get to work on resistant syphilis, etc. Mankind can solve problems if we're motivated enough. I'd like to see medicine advance to the point that there is almost no disease. I don't care if the disease is caused by behaviour or not.

You're also ignoring the fact that many HIV infections are within commited relationships. How is it someone's fault if their spouse cheated on them?

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[DecoDragon]

On the one hand it must be horribly annoying. You know what you want and they won't respect your descission. On the other hand, there are lesbian, it's no secret, Mom's who have given birth to children. So, perhaps that's the doctor's concern. That should you decide to get pregnant, they're liable for having prescribed the drug. Even if it is inconceivable to you and not something you want at all, the doctors can't know your mind on this one. I'd be cautious to if I was held liable for things that were outside of my control.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Seraphim1982]

Where does anyone say that 27% of people with aids are getting it when they are over 50? The GP makes two points:
Point 1 - 27% of those in the US living with HIV are over 50
Point 2 - they are the fastest growing group of new HIV cases
You seem to agree with point 1, so I figure your problem is with point 2. The article says "AIDS cases among the over-50 crowd have soared from 16,000 in 1995 to 90,000 in 2003 a 500 percent increase". Please point me to another group in the US that experienced a 500+ percent increase in AIDS cases in those years.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Anonymous Coward]

no, they just want to molest heterosexual's children.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Anonymous Coward]

"Yes, but while you are of child-bearing age I'm not comfortable prescribing..."
"Lesbian. Leeeeeeeeesbian."

Artificial Insemination? Rape? Hello? Or should we taxpayers pay for the abortion too?

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Politburo]

HIV is an INCURABLE disease, which kills %100 of it's victims.

This is not true. Just last week I read this article about people who get HIV but never show any symptoms.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[lkypnk]

The issue is that most people infected with HIV are not in developed nations which can afford to treat them.

And besides, type I diabetes is indeed a fatal disease for people without access to insulin (read, many people in poor nations.). Aditionally, I have one friend who has had significant side effects from his diabetes, although he is only in his 20s. He considers it to be a fatal disease and expects to die of the complications from it.

Unless/until we raise the entire standard of living of the whole world to something decent, HIV, diabetes, etc. will all be managable for some people, but lethal and horrifically dehabilitating for most.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Some_Llama]

Mother and child have separate, isolated blood systems during pregnancy."

I always thought they shared blood, one of my friends had the problem where the body sees the baby as a foriegn object and tries to kill it, she had to take immune suppresors to reduce this effect in order to bring the baby to term... how would this be a problem if they had seperate blood systems?

Also what DO they share then through the umbilical cord? I know they share nutrients, but I also thought some of the mother's immunities where passed this way?

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[yfarren]

The GGP says that the over 50 crowd is the fastest growing group of new aids cases.

The article says there is a 500% growth in people over 50, who have aids.

There is no correlation between these statements at all. Lets just assume that there is no other demographic group which has grown by 500% over the last 10 years.

All that the article says is that TODAY there are 90k people over 50 with aids. NOT that 90k people over 50 have become infected with aids, but rather that there are 90k people WITH aids.

So, lets say, last year, 89k people who were 49 had aids. This year, they turned 50. Those are not new infections. Those are just infected people getting older.

Why is the disticiton important? Because a vaccine is only useful amongst people who dont yet have aids. I am not saying that there isnt a massive growth in the senior circuit in aids. I really dont know. But the GGP is claiming an article says one thing (People over 50 are the most rapidly growing group of new aids cases) when it says no such thing. Hence I complain about mods, who mod it up, when in fact, they dont read the article. Because his relevant "point" isnt true at all (at least, not from the article he quoted).

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[sumdumass]

You seem to want people to suffer, and you seem to take pleasure from having horrible consequences handed out to people who you think deserve it.

I think you got it all wrong. I'm not advocating or taking pleasure in anything of the sorts. You see, In a free society, I should be free to choose what medical proceedures I want to be subjected too or not. The only time this should be questioned is when it can imeadietly effect some one else by no fault of thier own. I'm talking diseases and illnesses that can be caught by walking into a room or because of some pathogen in the water. I'm talking about something someone has to decide to do in order to become infected.

Why stop there? We don't need medical advances for heart disease since if you eat properly and exercise you aren't likely to have trouble. We shouldn't set broken bones since careful prudent folk don't break them in the first place.

And here is were i'm convinced you got it all wrong. You see, it isn't like that. This vaccine being forced on people is more like forcing someone to have a tripple bypass because they might need it in the future based on all thier fatty food intake today. Imagine having to wear a full body cast because you might not be careful or prudent and break some bone. There is a difference here. It is forcing some one to do some medical proceedure in case they decide to get careless. There are groups of homosexual men who get thier jollys off by having unprotected sex with HIV/AIDS infected men. It is as if they are intentionaly trying to get infected. Why would you deny someone this freedom?

Why not have a more positive attitude? If we can cure/vaccinate against HIV it is a good thing. HPV is already well along it's way to being managed. Then we can get to work on resistant syphilis, etc. Mankind can solve problems if we're motivated enough. I'd like to see medicine advance to the point that there is almost no disease. I don't care if the disease is caused by behaviour or not.

Possitive attitude? I'm not negetive about this at all. I'm just saying "don't force it on me or other people". If some one wants to take the vaccine, then let them. Don't force the children to take it against thier will. Don't force me to take it against my will. Don't force people to do something on the premise they might be infected some day by some disease that takes a certain amount of willingness to become infected. If you want to take the vaccine, then by all means do so. If some children or thier parrent want to take it, then let them. Just don't force it.

You're also ignoring the fact that many HIV infections are within commited relationships. How is it someone's fault if their spouse cheated on them?

I'm not ignoring that at all. If someone thinks they need to be vaccinated aginst some STD because thier spouse might cheat on them, they might want to re-evalutate thier relationships too. Nothing is stoping them from being vaccinated outside the vaccine not being made yet. But thus type of cheating/relationships is probably a big reasons we have as many problems that we do in society today. But if your trying to say that everyone should be vaccinated against HIV/AIDS so thier spouse can cheat on them, or because they _will_cheat_one them, then your missing the mark.

Like I said, more people die from drinking and driving accidents then AIDS/HIV infections. This vaccine is probably going to be too expensive for normal people anyways.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Jahz]

Did the microbiologist take discrete math/logic?

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Anonymous Coward]

Birth defects anyone?

No thanks, I'll pass on that. What else do you have?

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Axe 336]

The gay community is still part of the human race and will need people to reproduce someday too. I'm sure they don't want only deformed children up for adoption.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[LarsWestergren]

Also, I think that the slashdotting community would probably not be adverse to you writing down some of your romantic exploits.

Yeah, not surprising that she posted anonymously...

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, being on slashdot means that the first one is taken care of.

Aside from that, don't forget to never have sex once you're married, you never know who your mate slept with before, or is sleeping with now.

Everyone should just die virgins, that will end the AIDS problem once and for all.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[LunaticTippy]

Sorry, I think I did misinterpret your attitude.

Many people have a strange outlook on risk and statistics, especially young people. Buying lottery tickets, driving drunk, reckless driving, unsafe sex, et. al are symptoms of this. People aren't going to think of theirselves as at risk. I'd bet that most HIV+ people didn't plan on getting infected. I have a friend who got infected from her husband. She was a virgin when they got married. She thought there was no risk because she trusted him and they even got tested before the wedding. The African countries with 30% infection rates are full of similar stories.

AIDS is such a deadly disease and the medicines are so expensive to manage it. Smallpox, polio, etc. were all nearly eradicated by mandatory vaccination. Why not eradicate HIV too? People have always done stupid things, and they always will. If you're counting on human morality to control disease you're going to be disappointed.

If we get a working vaccine, let's spend 10+ years focusing on high-risk groups watching carefully for side effects. If it's effective and safe we have the chance to wipe it out entirely within a generation.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, if there is any medical procedure that should be banned, it's certainly not abortion. It's artificial insemenation.

It's rediculous - you have some guy you want to get pregnant with, GO FUCK HIM. Don't inflate everybody's insurance costs by having a medical procedure.

Fucking stupid.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Shads]

You missed the entire point why it's a pefect analogy. You also didn't read what I wrote, it's an immunity from being able to shoot YOURSELF in the head ever. Not basic immunity... hell for a bullet immunity i'd be tempted to take a 10% chance of dying...

Contracting hiv/aids, at least in western culture, is in almost all cases absolutely preventable... just as preventable as putting a gun to your head and pulling the trigger.

If you choose not to protect yourself you've basically choosen to play russian roulette. Personally rather than choose to play russian roulette I choose to protect myself each and everytime.

If it were simply a matter of "sick for a week" as opposed to 10% die like the OP specified, even if I didn't live somewhere it was necessary i'd take the "sick for a week".

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[badbit]

Or receiving an infected organ transplant...

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[Eivind]

Well ok. But I'd like to point out that it's possible to get HIV trough no fault of ones own.

For example, you can be perfectly reasonable about precautions (i.e. use a condom always except with a longtime stable-partner where you are both tested) and still get HIV for examplre trough unfaithfulness of that partner or trough rape. The latter is fairly much more common in some of the countries with higher hiv-rates than it is in western europe and the usa.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[HeroreV]

If the baby is defective enough it won't be able to sue.

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof??

[HeroreV]

You think that's bad? I'm male, but when I went on isotretinoin (super good acne meds) I had to hear hundreds of times how bad the stuff is for pregnant woman. "Don't let any women try this." "Don't leave this where females can get to it." "Never let any girl get within 10000 miles of these pills."

obvious question

[annakin]

It would be nice if someone did a control first to see if people infected with HIV actually die.

(Ooh, someone's going to mod me troll. Nice try.)

Re:obvious question

[kfg]

. . .see if people infected with HIV actually die.

Yes, indeed they do. I guarundamntee it.

KFG

Re:obvious question

[daniil]

It would be nice if someone did a control first to see if people infected with HIV actually die.

To this date, noone has managed to live forever (i.e. not die). Please post evidence that people infected with HIV life forever.

Re:obvious question

[annakin]

Some of them do. A lot of them don't.

HIV is a retrovirus. According to Duesberg, who was a nobel candidate in retrovirology, retroviruses never cause disease.

David Rasnick, who invented protease inhibitors, says that HIV has "never been found in a human being."

Rodney Richards, who helped found AmGen, says that HIV tests are "an illusion."

Kary Mullis, nobel prize winner, who invented PCR, says "I haven't seen any evidence, or even anybody trying to show evidence," that HIV causes the 30 diseases known as AIDS.

Robert Gallo, who announced HIV's connection with AIDS at a press conference, stole his sample from a French lab. What other scientific breakthroughs were announced at press conferences...cold fusion, human cloning.

Re:obvious question

[kfg]

A lot of them don't.

Produce one that doesn't.

. . .retroviruses never cause disease.

Go back and read carefully.

KFG

Re:obvious question

[Eric Damron]

"(Ooh, someone's going to mod me troll. Nice try.)"

Yeah, no kidding... Was that remark supose to be funny or are you just putting on your insensitive boob hat??

Re:obvious question

[MustardMan]

Those are some pretty bold statements to be making without sources. And no, wikipedia is not an acceptable source here, unless it cites some REAL sources.

Re:obvious question

[annakin]

How about I post evidence that people infected with HIV don't die of AIDS? You can start with the movie The Other Side of AIDS. There's plenty of people interviewed in that movie who went off meds and survived, including the woman who made the film. A few who went off meds and died, and a bunch stayed on meds and died.

Here's a paper by Duesberg and Rasnick:

http://www.healtoronto.com/survivors.html#lts

"Indeed, the HIV-researchers David Ho et al. inadvertantly provided the key to long-term survival: 'none had received antiretroviral therapy'. Likewise, Alvaro Munoz reported that not one of the long-term survivors of the largest federally funded study of male homosexuals at risk for AIDS, the MAC study, had used AZT.

"In December 1995 The Advocate, the largest national gay magazine, published the story of Dennis Leoutsakas, a man who is HIV-positive 'for at least 17 years [but] doesnt have AIDS - and no one knows why'.

"Similar observations have been made by the late homosexual AIDS activist Michael Callen:
In researching his 1990 book Surviving AIDS, Callen interviewed nearly fifty people who had lived for many years not just after being pronounced HIV-positive, but after an AIDS diagnosis. He found that only four had ever used AZT; three of those had since died, and one was dying of AZT-induced lymphoma. But the overwhelming majority of long-term survivors had somehow managed to resist the enormous pressure to take AZT."

(I get modded -1 for mentioning a control group, and you get +1 for talking about living forever.)

Re:obvious question

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be nice if someone did a control first to see if people infected with HIV actually die.

Since you seem to believe so fervrently that HIV does not cause AIDS, I propose we use you as our test subject. How about it? Willing to stake your life on the idea that a retrovirus can't kill you?

Re:obvious question

[Anonymous Coward]

Woosh! (sound of joke flying over your head)

Yes, that's all fine and dandy, but the mortality rates of HIV infected vs not HIV infected is exactly the same: 100%

Re:obvious question

[Atmchicago]

You are on the verge of trolling, but I'll bite. Your post makes a bunch of claims about what famous people said. According to your logic, because smart scientists say something, they must be right.

You then try to say that because some things presented at press conferences were fakes, that all things presented at press conferences were fakes. Logic 101, anyone?

The overwhelming evidence for the link between the presence of HIV antibodies in human beings and the development of AIDS is convincing enough.

Your arguments are so poor I don't know whether or not you are serious. I really hope you aren't.

Re:obvious question

[annakin]

Most of my sources come from the movie The Other Side of AIDS, where these people are personally interviewed. If you think I'm misquoting them, then it's your burden of proof. These researchers positions on AIDS are well-known.

In fact, here you go:

http://www.theothersideofaids.com/transcript.html

Mullis: "You know, to say that all 30 of those are somehow caused, in at least some cases called AIDS cases, by a virus called HIV, I think -- I haven't seen any evidence for that. I haven't even seen anybody trying to bring evidence forth for that."

Re:obvious question

[MustardMan]

Wow a fucking movie... yeah, because movies are NEVER made to push a political agenda. How about some articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals?

Re:obvious question

[antifoidulus]

And if they do, well, I'm going to the whorehouse!

Re:obvious question

[Rakishi]

You evidence is a movie with an agenda... Have you seen anything Michael Moore has ever made, ever? It's fucking trivial to make quotes say anything you want with some creative splicing and dicing.

Only an utter nitwit would ever use a single movie for evidence of anything.

Re:obvious question

[daniil]

How about I post evidence that people infected with HIV don't die of AIDS? You can start with the movie The Other Side of AIDS.

Oh, please. This is just like "proving" someone that 9/11 was an inside job by telling that person to watch Loose Change. Citing a bad documentary film as evidence is only proof of you belonging to a group of people with a certain mindset.

Here's a paper by Duesberg and Rasnick

While the question Duesberg poses (whether the current definition of AIDS is a reliable one) is interesting, his answer to this question is less so. From the little I've read (I'm not even a medical student, and I don't know more about AIDS and its causes than an average person does), his hypothesis that AIDS is several different things lumped together doesn't really hold water -- probably because it's based on cherry-picking facts and ignoring others that are related to them.

Re:obvious question

[AngryUndead]

Make sure to get the vaccine first.

Re:obvious question

[annakin]

Nice try. I provided a transcript. And as I said, these people make the same claims outside of the movie, in papers and in other interviews.

"Only an utter nitwit would ever use a single movie for evidence of anything." Single movie?? Talk about putting words in my mouth.

Re:obvious question

[annakin]

I am serious.

>According to your logic, because smart scientists say something, they must be right.

Isn't that your position regarding HIV/AIDS? That a bunch of TV stories told you so, so it must be right?

>You then try to say that because some things presented at press conferences were fakes, that all things presented at press conferences were fakes. Logic 101, anyone?

As usual, a JREF-style skeptic takes 1/7th of the facts I posted and tries to blow the significance of it out of proportion. I made 6 other claims, and your only other response is that smart people aren't to be trusted.

>The overwhelming evidence for the link between the presence of HIV antibodies in human beings and the development of AIDS is convincing enough.

Funny, all the people I listed say they've been looking for that link in the science journals and have never seen it.

Re:obvious question

[Rakishi]

Nice try. I provided a transcript.

Christ, you're such an idiot you can't even comprehend simple English. Transcripts are worthless as I said, you can mangle and change things a lot without anyone noticing. Only an idiot would not realize that. Not to mention that quotes are equally worthless, you can find dozens of people who are equally intelligent and say the opposite.

And as I said, these people make the same claims outside of the movie, in papers and in other interviews.

And yet you fail to provide any of them.

Single movie?? Talk about putting words in my mouth.

You're the one who quoted only a single movie, not me.

Re:obvious question

[annakin]

>Oh, please. This is just like "proving" someone that 9/11 was an inside job by telling that person to watch Loose Change.

You ignored the whole section of quotes showing that people in peer-reviewed studies do survive HIV.

When a person ignores arguments as a way of making a "rebuttal", I start to wonder if they have a vested interest.

Re:obvious question

[annakin]

>And yet you fail to provide any of them.

I've been providing them all over this discussion. Start reading.

Or maybe you could use, you know, Google? It's funny, you seem to be implying that I've fabricated whole careers and yet you still need *me* to prove your case.

Re:obvious question

[monoqlith]

Even if the number of people with AIDS is not 100% correlated with the number of people who are seropositive for HIV, and 100% mutually exclusive with people who are HIV negative, the millions of people who have died of AIDS since it emerged and whose HIV tests are positive is proof enough for me and most scientists. Especially during the eighties when an HIV positive test result gave you a 6 month to 3 year life expectancy which much more often than not elapsed and resulted in the death of a patient. There is DEFINITELY a relationship between HIV seropositivity and the development of AIDS, while it is not known if HIV is the *only* agent involved in AIDS. The correlation is in the high 0.9s which is a reasonable criterion to establish some kind of causal relationship. Not to mention that viral load tests(which use methods to detect the volume of HIV DNA in the blood) are good at predicting illness, and drugs that target specific aspects of the HIV reproductive cycle(transcriptase inhibitors and protease inhibitors) are effective in preventing full-blown AIDS to people whose previous seropositivity would have resulted in death is good enough proof for me. The burden of proof is on the scientists you bring up to produce a different agent which shows as high a correlation with the development of the immune-related opportunistic diseases with which AIDS is associated. Until they can do this, they are not helping the battle against the AIDS pandemic by raising the specter of doubt over something that is reasonably established.

Also, the lack of 100% overlap between HIV positive people and people with AIDS related disease may be explainable by other, possibly more simple, probably more plausible theories. For instance, there may be some mechanism which in those people without AIDS, left untreated, are able to stop the reproduction of the HIV virus using the human cellular reproduction system. Science's time would be better spent by studying those who are exposed to HIV or are seropositive for HIV but don't develop the disease sans treatment than by discounting the role of HIV in AIDS altogether. Moreover, to account for the seronegativity in people who do go on develop immune deficiencies associated with AIDS: lots of diseases can be infective and still not cause the immune system to produce antibodies, and fairly pronounced diseases can go undetected if the immune system is suppressed to begin with, so that it fails to produce detectable antibody levels.

Re:obvious question

[RsG]

To this date, noone has managed to live forever (i.e. not die).

That's because everyone carries an infectious disease called Life, which is 100% fatal and, like HIV, is transmitted through unprotected sex.

Luckily, it's easily curable. Unfortunately, the cure is a rather unpopular one...

Re:obvious question

[monoqlith]

Isn't that your position regarding HIV/AIDS? That a bunch of TV stories told you so, so it must be right?

That's not his logic. His logic is that reasonable tests of the HIV/AIDS theory have shown it to be most probably true, and there is a high correlation between seropositivity for HIV and the development of and eventual death due to AIDS related illnesses. If your argument is that we shouldn't trust *any* fact that we are handed, you are correct: no fact is 100% true. But that makes life unviable, and there are reasonable, recognized criteria for distinguishing between truthful claims and deceptive ones. One of those criteria is the amount of scientific evidence furnished to prove a claim. There is a ton of such evidence for the HIV/AIDS correlation, just like there is a ton of evidence for evolution and global warming.

Your only other response is that smart people aren't to be trusted.

Please take a look at his logic again. You are deliberately changing the sense of his statement. All he said was that smart people shouldn't be trusted just because they have a history of being smart. That is, intelligence is a necessary but not sufficient condition for being correct about intellectual or scientific questions.

Funny, all the people I listed say they've been looking for that link in the science journals and have never seen it.

The link is implied by the amount of data supporting it and widely recognized. There is no scientific paper that is *simply* about the link between HIV and AIDS, but the statistical supporting the accepted link is overwhelming. My other post details why it is these scientists' burden of proof to challenge what is seen as a reasonable conclusion about the relationship between HIV and AIDS.

Re:obvious question

[MustardMan]

You're the one making outrageous claims that go against all conventionally accepted wisdom. When you make ridiculous claims, the burden of proof is on YOU. Unless you want us all to think you're a whackjob, which is pretty much what you've accomplished so far. If that's the case, keep doing what you're doing, it works like a charm.

Re:obvious question

[kfg]

. . .but the mortality rates of HIV infected vs not HIV infected is exactly the same: 100%

OMG!!!!111!1, Dude, we're all going to . . .

Now, let's not always see the same hands.

KFG

Re:obvious question

[Anonymous Coward]

Good call. Correlation is not proof. AIDS is a syndrome that can be caused by numerous other factors.

Re:obvious question

[grolschie]

> > The overwhelming evidence for the link between the presence of HIV antibodies in
> > human beings and the development of AIDS is convincing enough.
> >
> Funny, all the people I listed say they've been looking for that link in the science
> journals and have never seen it

Funny that! For more reading check out "Kicking the Sacred Cow" by James P. Hogan. It would appear that your reason and logic are falling on deaf ears.

Can someone please post links to peer-reviewed scientific journal articles that prove that HIV causes AIDS? If we truly are to believe this, then the burden of proof is on them to prove it, not us to disprove it.

Re:obvious question

[LarryLong]

"David Rasnick, who invented protease inhibitors" Is it just me, or does that sound like something you would wear to a strip club?

Re:obvious question

[thesandtiger]

Will you volunteer to be infected with HIV to carry this experiment out?

Re:obvious question

[thesandtiger]

Inject yourself with HIV infected blood. If you're right, then there should be nothing to fear, right?

Re:obvious question

[Arker]

Science 101: Correlation is not causation!

It's quite possible, as Duesberg has suggested, that HIV is simply a very weak virus that only really has a chance to multiply inside a compromised immune system. That would explain the correlation.

Papadopulos and others point out another possibility - it's uncertain just what is being detected. In the absence of a bona-fide isolation of the virus, it's nothing but guesswork. The proper isolation of the suspected infectious agent is a very basic, fundamental step in dealing medically with any infectious disease - with one exception. AIDS. This shouldn't take more than a couple hundred thousand dollars to do, even assuming that's it for some reason far more difficult to do with HIV than with any other infectious agent known to man. Millions of dollars are thrown around for reasearch on the subject every year, but for some reason no one will spare a couple hundred thousand to actually make sure that the working hypothesis all this money is being spent on is actually correct? Something stinks here.

I don't know if AIDS is caused by HIV or not, but I do know that this is a question that *should* have been settled long ago, and either way, this episode will be one of the textbook examples of the perils of politicising science in a couple decades or so.

Re:obvious question

[Arker]

Here. And here.

Re:obvious question

[Arker]

Oh, here's some Mullis for you too.

Re:obvious question

[MustardMan]

The duesberg thing looks like he legitimately makes those claims - however his list of publications on his university website shows nothing published since 1997 on the topic, and doesn't even catalog his publications before then.

The perth group website has a bunch of tiny abstracts full of opinions, and oh don't forget some "letters to the editor" complaining about this or that in a certain study. Very little actual science there, a lot of blowing smoke out of their asses.

Either way, you can always find three supposedly legit people who support ridiculous ideas - there are a lot of scientists out there. Show me some recent, real research, not propaganda websites, that is published in a major scientific journal, providing actual experimental study to show HIV doesn't cause AIDS.

Re:obvious question

[monoqlith]

HIV has been cultured in vitro. Its genome and DNA have been sequenced and examined. Its infectious process has been observed - hence the availability of therapies to treat HIV disease, which incidentally also produce increased T-cell counts. HIV has also been shown to cause disease in infected animals when infected with pure HIV.

  How much more isolation do you want? Despite what Duesberg argues, all of Koch's rules for determining the infectious agent of a disease have been fulfilled. People who say that HIV has not been sufficiently proven to be the cause of AIDS, such as the Perth group, have set up ridiculous standards that are not even fulfilled by other, widely accepted causative agents. The bottom line is: what did 30 million people die of, if not from HIV-caused AIDS? What caused the dramatic fall-off of AIDS related deaths in the US after anti-retroviral drugs were introduced and became affordable? What caused the giant explosion of AIDS in the gay community if something other than the HIV transmission via unprotected sex? How about among hemophiliacs and intravenous drug users? Why, when screening processes were put in place to detect the presence of HIV antibodies in blood donations, did the cases of infection via blood-transfusion go to approximately zero? Good science produces results. Duesberg hasn't produced any results.

Conspiracies on this scale don't happen in an open world. There will always be fringe voices on some radical position against a widely held theory - some of them are being polemicists just for the sake being polemicists, some of them are impervious to reason. The only conspiracies going on here belong to corrupt governments of poor countries who refuse their citizens the vital medical treatment with the justification of exactly the reasons you are giving, while their people die because they don't receive medicines that have been proven to be effective in scientifically rigorous studies and in the field.

Re:obvious question

[MustardMan]

Wow, a website registered in france, purporting to be from a guy living in california, who mentions NOTHING about this website on his own site at karymullis.com. Yeah, you really got me convinced.

Re:obvious question

[Arker]

You claim it's been "cultured", "sequenced", and "examined" but I note you don't say "purified." Fact is, until it's purified, you don't know what the heck it is you're "culturing, sequencing, and examining."

HIV has also been shown to cause disease in infected animals when infected with pure HIV.

Reference?

How much more isolation do you want? Despite what Duesberg argues, all of Koch's rules for determining the infectious agent of a disease have been fulfilled.

Duesberg, in fact, doesn't argue that at all. You're just so horribly confused here I don't even know what to say. Actually, Duesberg has probably offered the strongest arguments *against* the position you impute to him here of anyone involved.

The bottom line is: what did 30 million people die of, if not from HIV-caused AIDS?

Opportunistic infections taking advantage of a severely compromised immune system? That's clear. Now the interesting question is, what caused those immune systems to become so compromised. Even though a virus is a politically useful answer, it's certainly not the only logically possible answer. Nor is there any logical reason to deny that there may be different causes for different cases. The immune system is a complex system, and it's hardly inconceivable that it might break down for a number of reasons.

As to Duesbergs lack of results, results require experiments, experiments require money, and the day he opened his mouth and questioned Gallos claims his money has been cut off. And THAT is what we should all be outraged about. Duesberg has submitted countless grant proposals with good research designs that would have settled the issues he raises, one way or the other, with good solid data. Up until he opened his mouth on this issue, he was a top rank grant writer, and he's done a lot of first class science. But now all he can do is write, because experiments take money, and no one is willing to fund experiments that might prove the paradigm that the funding sources have embraced was wrong.

What caused the giant explosion of AIDS in the gay community if something other than the HIV transmission via unprotected sex?

OK, you've got a number of people with severely degraded immune systems. They're all homosexuals, part of a 'scene' that involves unprotected sex with many partners (and you can put that 'many' in capital letters and use the blink tab, it was several people a night, every night) as well as heavy hard drug use. You can't think of a single hypothesis to explain this besides an infectious agent? Please.

The immune system is known to have a tendency to go a bit haywire when overstimulated. Heavy drug use is exactly the sort of thing that would be expected to overstimulate it. It's hardly a stretch to consider that a longterm pattern of unprotected anal intercourse with numerous partners could have the same effect, if you think about it. Combine the two, and that seems like a quite possible explanation. It's too bad the empirical work that would allow us to confirm or deny that hypothesis has been consistently denied funding for twenty years, huh?

What caused the dramatic fall-off of AIDS related deaths in the US after anti-retroviral drugs were introduced and became affordable?

The decline in deaths might well be related to the decline in new cases. The decline in new cases might well have something to do with the decline in heavy hard drug use, and the decline in massively promiscous unprotected anal intercourse? Just a guess. Again, we'd know, but the experiments that would have provided the data just don't get funded.

Conspiracies on this scale don't happen in an open world.

This isn't exactly a conspiracy. It's not like all the people controlling the funding, and the people whose experiments they are funding, got togeth

Re:obvious question

[monoqlith]

Reference?

O-kay Look under bullets 1 - 4(which support the conclusion the pure HIV culture has caused AIDS in laboratory workers(i.e. humans) which is actually a stronger case than animals.

Duesberg, in fact, doesn't argue that at all. You're just so horribly confused here I don't even know what to say. Actually, Duesberg has probably offered the strongest arguments *against* the position you impute to him here of anyone involved.

Actually, he does argue that Koch's criteria have not been fulfilled, which is what I said he had argued against.

OK, you've got a number of people with severely degraded immune systems. They're a homosexuals, part of a 'scene' that involves unprotected sex with many partners (and you can put that 'many' in capital letters and use the blink tab, it was several people a night, every night) as well as heavy hard drug use. You can't think of a single hypothesis to explain this besides an infectious agent? Please.

I can think of lots of hypotheses but the fact remains that a simple hypothesis(the infective agent is HIV) is the most simple, most accurate, most backed-up hypothesis there is.

If your only answer is "drug use" you have a very weak argument. There are very very many cases of people who are not drug-users and who do not engage in promiscuous sex developing AIDS from exposure to HIV through unprotected sex or transfusions. Read the book "Borrowed Time" for instance. There are also very very many cases of heavy drug-users who do not end up with AIDS and are also, incidentally, HIV negative. Asserting that all gay people who develop AIDS are also hard drug users verges on statistically unfounded prejudice , the kind that the Reagan administration used to deny any obligation to help them.

Nor is there any logical reason to deny that there may be different causes for different cases.

Then the cases not caused by HIV but by other immune deficiency syndrome are not AIDS. I suggest you read this. Look under the justification for the fulfillment of Koch Rule 1. Scientists discovered that a small number of people having a clinical diagnosis of AIDS-like disease actually had a different disorder. Also look at the surveillance statistics.

The immune system is a complex system, and it's hardly inconceivable that it might break down for a number of reasons.

It does break down for a nubmer of reasons. Those are separate illnesses. The most coherent, simple, and productive explanation is that the constellation and development of AIDS-related illnesses and this kind of immune deficiency are caused by HIV, not any other cause. The simplest answer is usually the right one, as a guiding principle. IN this case, we have a simple answer and the data supports this answer. The fact it is complex points to the idea that one source capable of affecting it in its entirety is responsible - otherwise we have to assume that many different forces are responsible, an idea that on its face and statistically is untenable and violates Occam's razor.

As to Duesbergs lack of results, results require experiments, experiments require money, and the day he opened his mouth and questioned Gallos claims his money has been cut off. And THAT is what we should all be outraged about. Duesberg has submitted countless grant proposals with good research designs that would have settled the issues he raises, one way or the other, with good solid data. Up until he opened his mouth on this issue, he was a top rank grant writer, and he's done a lot of first class science. But now all he can do is write, because experiments take money, and no one is willing to fund experiments that might prove the paradigm

Re:obvious question

[strobe74]

I usually never post but that post was so stupid I felt compelled to respond. I think we should do studies on obvious cause and effect... To complete our study, please put the gun provided for you, to your head now.. and pull the trigger.. just so we can see if you suffer any "negative" effects from it. Disclaimer: After reading your post, we have concerns that we may not see any noticeable effect.

Re:obvious question

[daniil]

You ignored the whole section of quotes showing that people in peer-reviewed studies do survive HIV.

No. I ignored the whole movie (as I couldn't have watched it on such a short notice), only reading a couple of reviews for it. In the context of this discussion, this should be enough. These reviews (both positive and negative) provided me enough information to determine what kind of a documentary it is.

When a person ignores arguments as a way of making a "rebuttal", I start to wonder if they have a vested interest.

When a person starts talking about "vested interests" as a way of making a rebuttal, I know he's a crackpot.

In Soviet China...

[Odiumjunkie]

2000 yuan AIDS you!

Re:In Soviet China...

[Anonymous Coward]

Communist China, but whos counting....

pool's closed

[Anonymous Coward]

If this goes well we won't have to close the pools.

Re:pool's closed

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL!

Re:pool's closed

[Anonymous Coward]

Bobba!

Re:pool's closed

[Anonymous Coward]

4chan? on my slashdot?

Re:pool's closed

[Anonymous Coward]

Sad thing is, that was the first thing to go through my head as well when seeing this article. Damn you /b/, daaaaaaamn you!

Re:pool's closed

[Anonymous Coward]

HABEEB IT!

Re:pool's closed

[RyoShin]

I laughed harder at that than I really should have.

Desu.

Re:pool's closed

[Anonymous Coward]

>:3

Re:pool's closed

[Pancake Bandit]

Watch out for anonymous coward, he does not forgive!

Re:pool's closed

[Anonymous Coward]

JESUS CHRIST

Re:pool's closed

[Anonymous Coward]

ITS A LION

Re:pool's closed

[Anonymous Coward]

GET IN THE CAR!

Re:pool's closed

[lolocaust]

It's more likely than you think.

Re:pool's closed

[Anonymous Coward]

>>15946205
>>15946989
>>15947419
>>15949920

SAME FAGGOT.

HIV

[mfh]

Does it work though? Have these people been exposed properly to HIV and did they really reist picking it up?

All it takes is one night in the wrong club at the wrong time and no matter what kind of protection you have -- it could be too late.

Re:HIV

[AgentFade2Black]

Didn't you read the article? The HIV-1 cells they injected were genetically engineered not to have the ill effects of HIV/AIDS. So they were meant to, in all actuality, be like the HIV/AIDS of deadly reputation, but without the threat of lawsuits waiting in the wings.
 
Any questions?

Re:HIV

[brunokummel]

well, if you are really looking for some fun in the wrong club at the wrong time you're not really concerned about protection! you'll probably just play with the odds that nothing wrong is going to happen...

Re:HIV

[venicebeach]

from TFA:

Some recipients' cells and body fluids in the combined group appeared immune to the HIV-1 virus, said Sang Guowei.

Not sure exactly what this means, but it seems like they extracted body fluids and tried to infect with HIV in-vitro.

Re:HIV

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't fully understand. How do we know it is going to work against real HIV if only safe forms were tested? I guess the receptors and all that will be memorized by the immune system, but I don't see how that proves that an HIV infection still won't destroy the immune system. This isn't like a vaccine for polio. Polio attacks the intestines and the CNS while the immune system is just fine. HIV attacks the immune system directly. I could see it going two ways: 1) the immune system is weakened before it can effectively attack the HIV or 2) the immune system is strong enough that it kills all the HIVs before they can weaken the immune system.

Re:HIV

[Baloo Ursidae]

All it takes is one night in the wrong club at the wrong time and no matter what kind of protection you have -- it could be too late

Remember: NIGHTCLUBS KILL!

Re:HIV

[dhasenan]

Vaccines need not be 100% effective to be useful.

This stage of the trial is meant to see if the vaccine is safe for human consumption--that is, it didn't kill any lab animals; regardless of its positive effects, we need to know if it's going to be dangerous. Then we can concern ourselves with the positive effects.

Re:HIV

[osee]

Just don't fuck with strangers. That's all it takes.

Re:HIV

[badhack]

Considering how difficult it is to get infected I'd be more afraid of an untested partner!

Doesn't it take a little longer?

[slapyslapslap]

"The recipients appeared immune to the HIV-1 virus 15 days after the injection, indicating the vaccine worked well in stimulating the body's immunity," Doesn't it take a little longer to know if HIV is going to take hold? "Immune" is a little presumptive at this point.

Re:Doesn't it take a little longer?

[albalbo]

Well, I seriously doubt that they were telling these people to go out, sleep around and try to get pozzed up - that would be mildly unethical, I would think.

I would suggest they probably tried introducing HIV into a blood sample of the patient, and tried to see how successful HIV was in reproducing. If it can reproduce well in "normal" blood, but badly in the blood of the patient, that's a reasonable indication that they're immune.

Re:Doesn't it take a little longer?

[Anonymous Coward]

I dont get this. They infect health ppl with the virus???. God!

Re:Doesn't it take a little longer?

[UltimApe]

I'd imagine they'd be using blood samples or some other sample to test, not actually on the subjects themselves, it might be faster that way.

Re:Doesn't it take a little longer?

[robotoverflow]

Didn't rtfa but for at least that quoted sentence it was said that they appeared immune, not that they were immune. I'm sure they're well aware of the difference between first observations and actual results.

Re:Doesn't it take a little longer?

[pe1rxq]

Yes, its a very common practise called vaccination. It is usually done by growing a weakened variant (today often through genetic manipulation but you can also take a relative of the virus that is faught back by the body easily) that resembles the virus you want to protect against. This virus is similar enough that the antibodies generated against it will also work against the real thing.

You never learn't this in biology?

Re:Doesn't it take a little longer?

[jacquems]

I would suggest they probably tried introducing HIV into a blood sample of the patient, and tried to see how successful HIV was in reproducing. If it can reproduce well in "normal" blood, but badly in the blood of the patient, that's a reasonable indication that they're immune.

An interesting study would be to take a control blood sample from the volunteers before vaccination and see how successfully HIV reproduces in it. Then, take another sample after there has been time for immunity to develop and compare how successfully HIV can reproduce in that to the control sample. That way, you could be reasonably sure that the vaccine was causing the results in this particular patient. After all, some people are genetically immune to HIV to begin with.

Proof of Immunity?

[infidel13]

According to the article, "The recipients appeared immune to the HIV-1 virus 15 days after the injection." Maybe someone can help with this, but how do you test immunity with fatal illnesses? Obviously you can't simply expose the subjects to the pathogen causing the disesase (not ethically, anyway). Does anyone in a medical field happen to know how this works?

Re:Proof of Immunity?

[swissmonkey]

You know that statistically, X percent of a population will contract the disease over a specific period of time, so you vaccinate a bunch of people, and you check whether the number of people getting the disease in your group is lower than the average or not.

Re:Proof of Immunity?

[jeremymiles]

This is the first trial, which means it's a phase 1 trial. Phase 1 trials are not designed to demonstrate efficacy, they are to demonstrate safety. Whether it works or not comes next.

Re:Proof of Immunity?

[metroplex]

I was asking myself the same qiestion as the GP post, thanks for your reply. But doesn't that "bunch of people" that has been vaccinated behave in a different way in regard to AIDS than any other random bunch of people would, therefore making the statistical analysis worthless? I'm just curious.

Re:Proof of Immunity?

[Anonymous Coward]

According to the article (which means actually reading the article, try it sometime), volunteers were given the vaccine which does not contain a live HIV-1 virus. Fifteen days later, they provided fluid and blood samples to be infected with the virus. Those samples appaer to be immune.

Re:Proof of Immunity?

[Drooling Iguana]

That's what placebos are for.

Re:Proof of Immunity?

[akratic]

There were forty-nine people in the trial, and the trial started less than two years ago. The article didn't say that the volunteers were from high risk groups. In two years, what's the likelihood that even one out of forty-nine randomly selected Chinese citizens between 18 and 50 will get HIV? I can't imagine it's high enough for us to conclude anything from the fact that none of the volunteers became infected with HIV during the study.

Zhang Wei claims that the volunteers "appeared immune to the HIV-1 virus 15 days after the injection." What's his evidence?

Re:Proof of Immunity?

[Kadin2048]

Well, as other people have pointed out, that wasn't the point of this study. This study was just to make sure that the drug was safe enough so that they could conduct more large-scale studies to determine it's efficacy at actually preventing AIDS.

However, I think that we can assume that in making the drug, before recruiting testers at all, they have probably done in vitro tests to determine that it makes exposed cells more resistant to HIV infection. (Otherwise, why bother doing Phase 1 trials?)

When you get larger sample sizes, then you can do in vivo studies. Not by actually injecting people with HIV and seeing if the vaccine made them immune (calling Dr. Mengele!) but by splitting the study participants into several groups, and giving some the actual vaccine and some a placebo, and then measuring the rates of HIV/AIDS infection in the two groups. This helps to cancel out any difference in behavior that people might have, as a result of getting the vaccination. It's pretty standard.

I don't think that anyone (except whoever wrote the summary) is saying that the 49-person study proved that it was actually effective against HIV in vivo. It's going to take more work to show that; right now they just need to make sure it's not going to kill the people they inject with it.

Re:Proof of Immunity?

[zoftie]

it's china, they can have people for the [communist] cause by the thousands.

Re:Proof of Immunity?

[EvilIdler]

I'm not a doctor, but I'm guessing they simply extract some blood and infect that
in a laboratory.

Re:Proof of Immunity?

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe that they just added HIV to a blood sample from the people, and saw how they immune system reacted towards the virus.

Re:Proof of Immunity?

[untermensch]

I'm not 100% sure but I believe at this point "it works" means that antibodies to the HIV virus are being produced by the body. The efficacy of the vaccine ie. whether or not those antibodies do what we hope they do, remains to be seen

Re:Proof of Immunity?

[Sethb]

I'd imagine that another group of possible subjects would be spouses/partners of those who have HIV, but who are themselves negative. Presumably they still engage in some sort of safe(r) sexual activity with their partner/spouse, but there is probably some risk of infection, depending on behavior. I'd also imagine that some percentage of that group accidentally contracts HIV, so if the vaccine lowers or eliminates that percentage, it'd be evidence of efficacy.

Re:Proof of Immunity?

[TheGreatHegemon]

I once saw a video for this... I was under the impression that basically it involved two groups of randomized individuals. One given the injection, the other not (or given a placebo). The lab then TELLS these people about safe sex and how to avoid HIV. Of course, they expect people to have sex anyway. They then compare the two groups. Grnated, i would think this takes more than 180 days...

Re:Proof of Immunity?

[metroplex]

Yes, I thought about that, but then test subjects taking the actual vaccine and test subjects taking placebo would act the same way, wouldn't they? Which would differ from the behaviour of people not in the test program.

Re:Proof of Immunity?

[1u3hr]

it's china, they can have people for the [communist] cause by the thousands.

You won't find any Communists in China under 75 these days. Mao died 30 years ago and Communism shortly after.

Re:Proof of Immunity?

[ceoyoyo]

Yes. That's why you compare the test group to the placebo group, NOT the general population. Say 1% of the general population gets infected with HIV, 5% of your placebo group (because some of them think they're safe) and 0.1% of your vaccine group. From that you deduce that your vaccine works better than nothing (provided your sample size is big enough to make that a significant difference).

That's not what they did in this trial. This trial is to check to make sure a small number of test subjects don't have any short term negative reactions. Scientists are curious though, and they usually try to see if their treatment looks like it's working anyway. It sounds like in this case they injected volunteers with things that look HIV like to the immune system but aren't. I suspect they also tried to infect blood samples with the virus.

49?

[CYwo1f]

Really, we're supposed to believe the study had exactly 49 participants? Not 50, or 150?

Re:49?

[cduffy]

Why not believe that they had 49 participants? Sure, people like round numbers -- but when you're deciding how many folks you can include in your study on account of your budget constraints, or looking at how many of the folks who signed up to participate qualify, reality sometimes rears its head and results in numbers which aren't so perfect.

Anyhow -- this is very good news.

Re:49?

[debilo]

Really, we're supposed to believe the study had exactly 49 participants? Not 50, or 150?

Pssst, there were 150 participants, but 101 of them died.

Re:49?

[Kitten Killer]

They probably had 50. (Well, more likely 100, with 1/2 in the placebo group.) One of the non-placebo patients dropped out of the study due to some exclusion criteria not related to the vaccine (such as getting hit by a car) and you end up with the 49. It could even be as simple as the patient having moved to another city. With any clinical trial, you're bound to lose some subjects to follow up.

Re:49?

[brunokummel]

Really, we're supposed to believe the study had exactly 49 participants? Not 50, or 150?
Pssst, there were 150 participants, but 101 of them died.

Or they got kicked out of the research because they got HIV in a night on the town celebrating that they were now immune to AIDS!

Re:49?

[nih]

they are not dead, they are pining for the fjords

Re:49?

[KDan]

Perhaps the other 101 participants were testing the South African version of the AIDS remedy: Lemon, Garlic and Beetroots ...

Daniel

Re:49?

[Darthmalt]

Wow Troll? I daresay someone didn't get the joke.

Re:49?

[CYwo1f]

Okay, I'll buy that. It just didn't sit well with me coming from the state-owned news agency.

If 101 people had died, they probably would have covered up the entire study - not released hopeful findings. But if only one person had died..

Good to see I'm not the only paranoid. :D

Re:49?

[evilviper]

Pssst, there were 150 participants, but 101 of them died.

Psst... only 99 of them died. The other two just wouldn't stop being so irritating...

Re:49?

[cduffy]

Why do you think you've found a fellow paranoid? Failing to report someone who dropped out for reasons not related to the success of the study (which is what the poster suggested) is legitimate, moral and honest -- and thus hardly the stuff paranoia is made of.

In short, what you've just bought is a non-paranoid explanation. (Good for you!)

Re:49?

[rbarreira]

Sorry to burst your bubble, they were 49 from he beginning! ;)

Re:49?

[KingEomer]

49 is a great number! It's a perfect square.

No more fear

[Ice Wewe]

Yes, no more fear of AIDS! Hippies unite!

Duck and Cover

[ElephanTS]

I'd be more interested in genuine scientific proof of the link between HIV and AIDS. There isn't one you know.

(Don't forget to mod me down - I said something bad)

Re:Duck and Cover

[WilliamSChips]

Okay, smart person, what does cause AIDS if it's not HIV? Goa'uld symbiotes?

Re:Duck and Cover

[AgentFade2Black]

We know that HIV is the virus which mutates into AIDS. Proof enough? It's like an axiom. Accepted without proof, because we already know it to be true.

Re:Duck and Cover

[Anonymous Coward]

The Evidence That HIV Causes AIDS

HTH. IHBT. HAND.

Re:Duck and Cover

[daniil]

According to the tinfoil crowd, it's the AIDS medicines that cause it.

Re:Duck and Cover

[slapyslapslap]

It doesn't "mutate" into aids. It causes AIDS.

Re:Duck and Cover

[Sammy Loo]

ehh this is sort of good. but 1) 49 people? wth is this experiment? 2) what strand? there are various strands of the virus 3) how does it affect children/old people?

Re:Duck and Cover

[rob1980]

Let me guess, you're one of those idiots that still think AIDS is a disease brought down on homosexuals by the almighty too, eh.

Re:Duck and Cover

[NecroPuppy]

Koch's Postulates and other proof

Short version, HIV causes AIDS.

I'd also say it proves you're an idiot, but we'd have to culture you in isolation as part of the process, and I don't think we can get funding for that.

Re:Duck and Cover

[debilo]

We know that HIV is the virus which mutates into AIDS. Proof enough?

No, because, well, you know, viruses cause diseases, they don't mutate into diseases. Even if we're laymen and not scientists, we should choose our words more carefully so as to not spread bullshit and misconceptions.

Re:Duck and Cover

[AgentFade2Black]

OK, fine. Maybe perhaps my choice of words wasn't the best. But I wasn't quite ready to feed the troll yet. So I chose a different word.

I atone for my sins.

Re:Duck and Cover

[Anonymous Coward]

I have that interest, too. It sounds like another excuse to boost stocks for pharmaceutical shareholders or to waste billions on Africa.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duesberg_hypothesis
http://www.buildfreedom.com/aidsdir.htm

Re:Duck and Cover

[Kitten Killer]

Since you're so sure, do you mind if I jab you this needle?

No? Thought so.

Re:Duck and Cover

[debilo]

I'd be more interested in genuine scientific proof of the link between HIV and AIDS. There isn't one you know. I've never unterstood this scientific war. People readily believe that a virus causes the common cold, but for some people, there's doubt that HIV causes AIDS?

Could someone with more insight please explain why there are scientists who deny there's a link?

Re:Duck and Cover

[daniil]

(Don't forget to mod me down - I said something bad)

No. You just said something that most intelligent people consider stupid, knowing that most Slashdotters (who, in all honesty, are not really as smart as they think they are) will consider it stupid as well. That's why you got modded down.

Re:Duck and Cover

[annakin]

It's not as stupid as you think. I made a nearly-identical post myself.

We might know that a lot of Slashdot mods aren't smart enough to Google HIV and AIDS before modding us down, but that doesn't mean we're not giving you the benefit of the doubt.

Re:Duck and Cover

[Anonymous Coward]

No, we're more than smart enough to google it and read up on the controversy. We're also smart enough to know that any scientific theory is met with resistance (usually from crackpots).

Plus any theory that has any political influence attached attracts many times as many crackpots as a non-political subject - see Soviet-era Russian biology, creationism, and social darwinism as examples of what happens when politics and science collide. Without exception in history the crackpot theories have been wrong.

(Posting Anon from a different computer to avoid undoing my moderations)

Re:Duck and Cover

[ichigo 2.0]

Could someone with more insight please explain why there are scientists who deny there's a link?

I suspect it's not the scientists that deny the link, at least not the honest ones.

Re:Duck and Cover

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course I mind, for three reasons.

1. It might be contaminated with a potentially deadly virus (like hepatitis).
2. I'll bleed all over my nice, clean shirt.
3. It hurts, damn it!

Re:Duck and Cover

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't understand. On the one hand we have the Human Immunodeficiency Virus, which causes a breakdown of the human immune system. Then we've got Advanced Immune Deficiency Syndrome, which is a breakdown of the human immune system. Are you saying that we've mislabeled the virus; maybe there's a different virus out there that should be called HIV? Or maybe we're looking at an HIB? Because the plain statement is as kooky as saying that the sun doesn't cause sunlight.

Re:Duck and Cover

[Anonymous Coward]

Accepted without proof, because we already know it to be true.

This sounds like the ravings of a mad bible thumper. Sorry, if the religious can't get away with this argument there is certainly no way this should be acceptable within the scientific community.

Re:Duck and Cover

[RsG]

...Soviet-era Russian biology...

I think you mean Lysenkoism:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism

Anyway, I'm not sure if there is a political angle to the whole AIDS/HIV controversy, outside of places like South Africa. With Lysenkoism, Creationism and social Darwinism, there are all obvious benefactors from propegating bad science, respectively Stalin, fundamentalist christians and racists. Who benefits from the bad science here?

Saying AIDS isn't caused by HIV is essentially a pseudoscientific view ("crackpot" as you put it), but it doesn't benefit anyone with money or power to try and make it look like actual science. Unless there's some angle I'm missing.

Re:Duck and Cover

[annakin]

Well among the crackpots are Kary Mullis, who won a nobel prize for inventing the polymerase chain reaction (used for "viral load" calculations), and David Rasnick, who makes protease inhibitors (an HIV therapy).

So you see, even the people whose research forms the core of the HIV/AIDS theory are claiming that their work is being misused.

Some other dissenters, as per http://www.virusmyth.net/aids/data2/citations.htm

Dr. Charles Thomas, former Harvard and Johns Hopkins Professor
Dr. Roger Cunningham, Director of the Centre for Immunology at SUNY Buffalo
Dr. Richard Strohman, former (emeritus) professor of UC Berkeley
Dr. Alfred Hässig, former (emeritus) professor at the University of Bern
Dr. Heinz Ludwig Sänger, former director of virology at Max-Planck Institutes
Dr. Walter Gilbert, 1980 nobel prize winner in chemistry
Dr. Andrew Herxheimer, former (emeritus) professor at UK Cochrane Centre
Dr. Steven Jonas, medical professor at SUNY Stony Brook
Dr. Etienne de Harven, professor at the University of Toronto
Dr. Harry Rubin, professor at UC Berkeley

I've left out the math professors, the law professors, the science journalists, etc. The people I listed are all in the medical field.

Re:Duck and Cover

[ElephanTS]

Debilo - thanks for your open minded response. If you give the following link a good read and think I think you will see why there are problems with the hypothesis. Dr Robert Gallo essentially hijacked the research with a non-peer reviewed hypothesis which became mainstream overnight by the NYT.

http://www.virusmyth.net/aids/

Re:Duck and Cover

[ElephanTS]

AIDS seems likely to be caused by many 'lifestyle' choices. Particularly exsessive drug taking (such as methyl and ethyl nitrates).

You could read this for more information.

http://www.virusmyth.net/aids/

And, thanks, I am pretty smart.

Re:Duck and Cover

[ElephanTS]

Your argument is circular and unscientific.

http://www.virusmyth.net/aids/

Re:Duck and Cover

[ElephanTS]

Your link contains the statement " AIDS is caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)." as part of the background. That is not rigorous science at work.

The HIV hypothesis fails Koch's postulates because the victim is not overrun by HIV at time of death as would normally be the case with a fatal virus infection. A circular argument is used to imply that this is the case when it is not.

ahref=http://www.virusmyth.net/aids/rel=url2html-1 7909http://www.virusmyth.net/aids/>

Re:Duck and Cover

[ElephanTS]

Absolutely not. I'm an committed atheist and not an idiot.

http://www.virusmyth.net/aids/

Re:Duck and Cover

[ElephanTS]

Mmm, 'nother rude one.

HIV does NOT satisfy Koch's postulates without a circular argument that is subtle but very evident in the reasoning. I doubt you've had the correct training to actually realise this though. I have an extensive training in public health experiments - things are much more subtle than you realise - and an IQ of 154.

http://www.virusmyth.net/aids/

Re:Duck and Cover

[ElephanTS]

agreed - big pharma took over this science and have earnt billions from an erroneous hypothesis.

Re:Duck and Cover

[ElephanTS]

To be honest that would be ok. I wouldn't die. A doctor once did this on Spanish TV 5 years ago and he's perfectly alright. I know that will sound crazy to you.

Try reading this:

http://www.virusmyth.net/aids/

Re:Duck and Cover

[ElephanTS]

I know of course. You've put your finger on it there though - the intellectual arrogance here is overwhelming sometimes.

Re:Duck and Cover

[ElephanTS]

Good questions. You could try reading this for more info:

http://www.virusmyth.net/aids/

It's a complex issue - good luck, and thanks for not being rude!

Re:Duck and Cover

[yndrd1984]

Becuse all those Africans living on "$1 a day" can afford drugs. Sure...

Re:Duck and Cover

[ElephanTS]

If you read the link and actually cared about this subject you'd see that malnutrition is also a big factor. Not to mention AIDS tests are not carried out on most African 'AIDS victims'. Have you heard of the word 'glib'?

Re:Duck and Cover

[annakin]

Saying AIDS isn't caused by HIV is essentially a pseudoscientific view ("crackpot" as you put it), but it doesn't benefit anyone with money or power to try and make it look like actual science. Unless there's some angle I'm missing.

Well THAT's a loaded question!

As James Pinkerton noted in his recent Newsday column, AIDS workers in South Africa make "10 times as much money" as non-AIDS workers.

AIDS drugs are very expensive and patentable.

The "viral cancer war" of the 1970's was running out of steam.

And the gay community would hate to admit that their lifestyle is a problem.

Is that enough rationale for ya?

Re:Duck and Cover

[yndrd1984]

The HIV hypothesis fails Koch's postulates because the victim is not overrun by HIV at time of death as would normally be the case with a fatal virus infection.

Being "overrun" is not one of Koch's postulates. In this case, HIV damages the immune system to the point where other diseases have an easy time killing the patient. Your logic would lead to the conclution that the flu doesn't make people sick, because most of the symptoms (fever, aches, weakness) are caused by the patients own body.

Re:Duck and Cover

[ElephanTS]

Hey annikin - isn't it frustrating when you supply some good info and the debate stops. At least we're on the same page :-)

Re:Duck and Cover

[yndrd1984]

Who benefits from the bad science here?

Where to start?
Homophobes - The evil gays are spreading disease!
Alternative therapy peddlers - I can cure AIDS with homeopathic medicine!
Politicians - AIDS was made by white men to kill black people!
Jackasses - Sure I'm HIV+ baby, but it doesn't cause AIDS!

Oh, forget it. This is too easy.

Re:Duck and Cover

[ElephanTS]

No it is. In a sample from a viral victims blood or cells there should be a significant amount of virus present that explains the breakdown of the system. If someone died of flu this would be the case. Why not HIV?

Re:Duck and Cover

[yndrd1984]

I'll tell a little more about your primary example, and one at random (other than the hypnotherapist, 'cause that would be too easy):

Kary Mullis - PCR is a general genetics technique, no knowledge of HIV or AIDS was needed to develop it, and while his name is given as the inventor of PCR, the invention was clearly a group effort, not a solo one. Kary is also well known for his LSD use and disbelief in both global warming and CFCs causing ozone damage, and his possible alien abduction.

Dr. Andrew Herxheimer - His quote says nothing about the HIV/AIDS link. All he's suggesting is that AZT isn't effective and could be dangerous. If that's the best proof you have, you've got a long ways to go.

I could get an equally qualified group to suggest that AIDS can be prevented by circumcision, or that autism is caused by mercury in vaccines. We should look at those possibilities, but when it's a few random doctors on one side and every major medical group on the planet on the other, I think it's safest to go with what the overwhelming majority is convinced of. Sure, sometimes we find that ulcers are cause by bacteria, but when that happens it should be easy to show the connection or lack of one - in this case there's no data, just a willingness to believe.

Re:Duck and Cover

[AgentFade2Black]

You dare to propogate a medical lie? A lie on the same magnitude and absurdity as Holocaust denial/revisionism?

I will have none of it. Get out. Now

Re:Duck and Cover

[ElephanTS]

are you joking or being serious?

Re:Duck and Cover

[yndrd1984]

No it is.

"Present" is different than "overrun".

In a sample from a viral victims blood or cells there should be a significant amount of virus present

There is, that's why most of us think that HIV causes AIDS.

If someone died of flu this would be the case. Why not HIV?

Most infections kill fairly directly, HIV does not. The ususal progression is: HIV infects the immune system (that's called being HIV positive), later the degraded immune system allows unusual infections to occur (that's called having AIDS), later the other infections kill the patient. It's like how small injuries used to often kill people - the wound gets infected, sepsis leads to gangrene, the gangrene damages the heart, and that kills the person.

Re:Duck and Cover

[beheaderaswp]

Thanks for clearing that up.

What an impressive website. Though, one must wonder how a successful treatment (antiretroviral compounds in a cocktail) appear to be successful in reducing the viral load to (here's a word) *undetectable* levels?

Considering I can find websites on the internets that claim we were ruled by an alien lord 95 million years ago, how serious would you expect me to take the claims of a site like this?

Granted- there's a lot of good information on the internet... but please.... let's get a little filter going in what's presented as fact.

Re:Duck and Cover

[khallow]

Well, why don't you describe your reasoning? The slashdot community can then analyze these claims, briefly debate their merits, and everyone can carry on. There are plenty of people who will be able to understand your points.

Re:Duck and Cover

[ElephanTS]

First point: I think we're just quibbling about a word.

Second point: I know how these things work it's just the causality HIV-->AIDS that seems to have no supporting evidence. The whole thing is unexplained. 20 years of research has found no connecting mechanism between the two things. This is always overlooked in all of the hysteria. How does a tiny retrovirus do that damage? Nobody knows at all.

Examine the history of how HIV was labelled as the culprit by Dr Robert Gallo. If you understand science you should see that it is very unscientific (no peer review, stolen work, etc) and this sensationalism has caused AIDS research to go off on completely the wrong tangent.

Re:Duck and Cover

[yndrd1984]

Have you heard of the word 'glib'?

Yes. My glibness is a measure of how well-formed I consider your arguments to be.

Not to mention AIDS tests are not carried out on most African 'AIDS victims'.

(I'll assume you meant "HIV tests", since you think HIV and AIDS are unrelated.) But the ones that do have HIV tests ... still fit the standard model.

If you read the link and actually cared about this subject you'd see that malnutrition is also a big factor.

So here's the story so far. Using drugs all the way through the early 70s never (or very, very rarely) caused AIDS, then gay drug users started getting it while the strait ones didn't, then 10 year old blood transfusion patients start getting it, and then the drug use starts affecting strait people in the same way. Meanwhile in Africa a new type of malnutrition appeared, much different than any other kind, primarily affecting the relatively wealthy truck drivers and the poorer hookers they visited. In the mean time, Africans cultures with more monogomous tendancies managed to avoid this new kind of malnutrition?

I'm sorry, but this is quite an odd story.

Re:Duck and Cover

[yndrd1984]

I think we're just quibbling about a word.

If that's true, then you're just flat out wrong about HIV not being present in AIDS patients.

How does a tiny retrovirus do that damage? Nobody knows at all.

It attacks immune cells. That lets other stuff do the more obvious damage. Like HPV, the viral infection qua the infection is harmless, but the side effects do kill. With HPV it's cancer, with HIV is a supressed immune system.

Examine the history of how HIV was labelled as the culprit by Dr Robert Gallo.

So one guy hijacked a whole branch of medical research, and everyone else just followed him. I don't buy it.

Re:Duck and Cover

[ElephanTS]

because it would take a book to do it. I made a short offhand comment and then thought I should defend it as it is very important. Briefly, there are problems with HIV/AIDS hypothesis which are subtle but crucial. Do some research on Dr Robert Gallo and see how he hijacked the research in an unscientific way and how things developed from there.

Re:Duck and Cover

[yndrd1984]

If you need a book to show (in brief) how something is a circular argument, your IQ is not 154.

Re:Duck and Cover

[ElephanTS]

How does a RV - essentially a bit of RNA (no cell walls) - attack a white cell? No one understands.

So one guy hijacked a whole branch of medical research, and everyone else just followed him. I don't buy it.

Science does make mistakes like this from time to time. But it's all out there - research him.

If that's true, then you're just flat out wrong about HIV not being present in AIDS patients.

HIV is found in most AIDS patients but not all. And then you have to think about the validity of the HIV test itself - is it valid? It doesn't appear to be. It works but detecting antibodies to the HIV RV itself but will always false positive if the blood sample is not diluted 400:1. And why the antibodies anyway? The inventor of the PCR test (used in HIV testing ) himself doesn't believe the link between HIV and AIDS. He's called Kary Mullis - check him out too.

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laure ates/1993/mullis-autobio.html

Re:Duck and Cover

[ElephanTS]

That's just silly.

Re:Duck and Cover

[ElephanTS]

http://www.virusmyth.net/aids/books.htm

Here are some books that explain the position. Complex arguments cannot always be explained in soundbite analysis.

Re:Duck and Cover

[RsG]

Homophobes don't really care what causes the disease. For them, it's not the vector, but rather its type of victim that matters.

Peddlers I'll believe. Ditto jackasses. Neither has much in the way of political clout however. For just about anything medical or scientific you'll have that lot arguing with the mainstream. They aren't on par with, say, Stalin and Lysenkoism, which is the comparison the person I responded to made - nobody would argue that homeopathic types have as much influence on our society as Stalin did on Soviet Russia.

As for politicians, I have seen what you're talking about, but that seems to be confined to Africa.

I see why those people benefit from bad fringe science, but they aren't on par with the examples given by the OP (Lysenkoism, creationism, and social darwinism). I.e. there aren't powerful people or groups pushing bad science on the masses to justify their ideology.

Re:Duck and Cover

[AgentFade2Black]

Absolutely serious. What, did you think I was trying to scare you or something?

Re:Duck and Cover

[AgentFade2Black]

The religious get away with this, mate? Never heard any of them use it before.

And besides, it has been done before in the scientific community. Why do you so willingly accept mathematics basics?

Re:Duck and Cover

[ElephanTS]

I know this is an odd story. AIDS is a very odd story. I clipped this from this website:

http://aliveandwell.org/



According to the 1999 World Health Organization (WHO) report, the total number of actual diagnosed AIDS cases on the African continent is about equal to the total for AIDS in America even though Africa, with its 650 million people, has more than two times the population of the USA. (61) Africa is often cited as a worst case example of what could happen in America despite figures that demonstrate that 99.5% of Africans do not have AIDS, and among Africans who test HIV positive, 97% do not have AIDS. (62)

Unlike in the United States, AIDS in Africa may be diagnosed based on four clinical symptoms -- fever, involuntary loss of 10% of normal body weight, persistent cough, and diarrhea -- and HIV tests are not required. (63) The four clinical AIDS symptoms are identical to those associated with conditions that run rampant on the African continent such as malaria, tuberculosis, parasitic infections, the effects of malnutrition, and unsanitary drinking and bathing water. These symptoms are the result of poverty and other problems that have troubled Africa and other developing areas of the world for many decades.

The idea that AIDS originated in Africa remains popular although there has never been scientific or epidemiological evidence to substantiate this notion. News reports suggesting that HIV began in Africa as Simian Immunodeficiency Virus (SIV) are based on elaborate speculation about species-jumping viruses rather than reliable evidence.

SIV induces only flu like symptoms in some experimental laboratory monkeys and does not cause any of the 29 official AIDS-defining illnesses. Unlike HIV infection which is said to cause illness only years after exposure and despite the presence of protective antibodies, SIV will cause illness within days of infection or not at all, and wild monkeys retain SIV antibodies throughout their lives without ever becoming ill. Only monkeys in unnatural circumstances -- lab animals with undeveloped immune systems who are injected with large quantities of SIV -- become ill. (65)

Re:Duck and Cover

[thesandtiger]

Okay, then let's put your bullshit to the test:

Let's inject you directly with some blood from an HIV+ person.

I'm sure we can find someone of your blood-type, with no other known pathogens - just HIV. Heck, if you're scared of contracting something else that we can't test for, I'm sure we could get some purified samples of HIV to inject you with.

After all - if it's lifestyle choices and not the virus, you'd have nothing to fear, right?

Re:Duck and Cover

[yndrd1984]

Again, we don't need every detail. Just an outline would do. Also, most of your books suggest that AIDS is caused by a factor other than HIV. That doesn't make the definition, or anyones argument I've seen, circular.

Re:Duck and Cover

[soliptic]

Still wrong I'm afraid - AIDS isn't exactly a disease. It's a syndrome: Acquired Immuno Deficiency Syndrome.

I'm no expert but my understanding is this basically means your immune system is kaput. Hence nobody really dies from AIDS, per se - they die from pneumonia or flu or any other number of (normally non-lethal) diseases, because their immune system cannot fight them off.

Re:Duck and Cover

[yndrd1984]

I was just pointing out that there are many personal and professional reasons that someone could have that would affect their views on AIDS. As for homophobes, if they can make the argument that AIDS is caused by drug use (as one person on slashdot has suggested) then the gay people are only suffering from their own actions, and don't deserve as much pity/help. If it's really caused by a virus, then they'd have to fall back to the "AIDS is Gods punnishment for homos" and "the Bible says so" arguments to connect homosexuality with evil, which are much weaker.

Re:Duck and Cover

[!coward]

Geez!! You're not going to tell me you truly believe that the millions of HIV-positive worldwide trying to figh off the infection with nasty drugs in the hopes of delaying as far as possible the onset of AIDS, plus the millions that already died as a result of AIDS, are all nothing but an incredibly elaborated hoax?! Exactly what do you think HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus) does?

Does its name not say anything to you? Whenever it finds itself in a suitable host, it does pretty much what every other virus does. It attempts to clone itself, as rapidly and violently as possible, using the mechanisms provided by the cells it invades. Only this one does it with a twist: it specializes in attacking certain components of our immune systems, and since our immune systems can't fight it off, we become immuno-compromised over time. That is to say, our body's ability to fight off every other bug decreases dramatically as the HIV infection progresses.

Hence the condition associated with an advanced-stage HIV infection: AIDS. It stands for Acquired Immuno-Deficiency Syndrome. And it HAS been proven that the agent responsible for that 'acquired immunodeficency' is, when we're talking about AIDS, the HIV virus. There are very clear rules defining the criteria you need to meet to associate a pathogen with a specific disease/condition. And these are clealy met when it comes to attributing AIDS to the HIV virus.

Of course, you CAN become immuno-compromised as a result of many different illnesses, you can be born immuno-compromised, the anti-rejection drugs you have to take after a transplant can make you severely immuno-compromised. So there isn't any clear cut way to determine whether an immuno-compromised person (even if they are HIV-positive), has become immuno-compromised as a result of an HIV infection (ie, has AIDS). There are only guidelines, elimination criterias, that allow you to diagnose someone as having the AIDS syndrome. But the same can be said about many other illnesses and syndromes where successful diagnose can only be achieved once a range of other (more likely, less statistically improbable) diseases have been thrown out. Parkinson's, for e.g., can't be diagnosed through a direct lab test or scan. You have to rule out other possible explanations for the symptoms. It doesn't make it any less real (remember the last years of Pope John Paul II?), nor the diagnose any less accurate or scientific.

To say that there is no proof of any link between the HIV virus and AIDS isn't just innacurate. It's just plain stupid. And, if I were you, I would seriously question the validity and merit (if not even the intent) of whomever it is that's feeding these misconceptions to you.

Finally: about HIV infection and AIDS being fatal. Strictly speaking, no one really dies of AIDS nor of an HIV infection, not as such. But you DO die as a RESULT of the syndrome CAUSED by an HIV infection. When your body, as a result of HIV infection, ceases to have a functioning immune system and can't fight off even the most common of viruses or bacterias, it becomes the perfect breeding ground for ANY bug that happens to enter your body. And when this happens, when a stupid, silly, common-cold-like virus/bacteria, finds itself rampaging through your body completely unimpeded, it will only stop when you're dead. It will infect every cell, in every tissue, eventually damaging your vital organs (heart, kidneys, lungs, brain, etc), until your body no longer offers the conditions it needs to proceed (ie, you're a cadaver). So I guess you can accurately say that AIDS does kill, by rendering your body completely defenseless (especially if you take into account the fact that we all have, at any time, a score of germs/pathogens coursing through our bodies).

In any case, although this is just a preliminary study, and the vaccine's efficiency is yet to be proven, and we're yet to know if it works for all sub-types of HIV-I (including the rare recombinant forms), which I seriously doubt, and the fact that this has nothing to do with a cure, but rather a possible future protection for anyone NOT HIV-positive, it's still good news. Every little advance in these areas of Medicine and Pharmacology are good news, doubly so when it pertains to such a terribly wide-spread disease.

Re:Duck and Cover

[yndrd1984]

He's called Kary Mullis - check him out too.

First, he isn't an expert on anything virus or immune system related. The "RT-PCR Test" only refers to fact that PCR is used to make copies of DNA/RNA in order to make test more accurate and so that small samples can be used - PCR isn't really the test itself, the Reverse Transcriptase to create DNA and the sequences on the container wall are the only truly required parts. Even worse, his only contribution to PCR is that he realized that using a heat resistant polymerase would make the older techniques (where heat destroyed the polymerases then in use) better.

The end result is that you're holding up the inventor of the Pyrex test tube (test tubes having already been invented) as expert on pregnancy, simply because one of the currently used pregnency tests (out of many) is refered to as "The Test-Tube Test".

Second, Kary Mullis is a nutjob. A fullbown global warming is a hoax, CFCs don't deplete the ozone layer, HIV doesn't lead to AIDS, LSD using, UFO abductee nutjob.

How does a RV - essentially a bit of RNA (no cell walls) - attack a white cell? No one understands.

So?

Science does make mistakes like this from time to time.

Yes, it's possible the HIV doesn't cause AIDS. But there's always that "exraordinary claims require extraordiary evidence" issue. The burden is on you, and all you've shown me is one intelligent crackpot and that there are unanswered questions.

Re:Duck and Cover

[oddfox]

Looks like you don't know how HIV works if you think 5 years is plenty of time to say that guy is all in the clear.

Here is a page with some details, but I'll snip out the important part that I thought was common knowledge to anyone who had done any sort of rudimentary research into this topic.

It has a long incubation period. Persons who are infected by the virus may have many years of productive normal life, although they can infect others during this period. It is not certain how long this latent period is; estimates range from five to fifteen years, with the shorter period being found in the developing world, where people are less healthy and well nourished. It is known that good health and nutrition, and early treatment of opportunistic infections, will extend the period of healthy and productive life. Unfortunately infected children will, for the most part, die before their fifth birthdays.

Quite frankly fives years ain't jack, especially if you're a healthy specimen in the first place. Sorry, not convinced, even if the website you continually link to in almost every comment on this thread has supporting statements from various experts. People can be wrong and very often are, no matter what background they come from, and people can very often have underlying reasons to say what they do (I'm not saying anyone there has such incentives, I'm simply saying that it's a very bad idea to just say oh that guy's an 'expert', he must know what he's talking about!).

Re:Duck and Cover

[yndrd1984]

According to the 1999 World Health Organization (WHO) report,...

It's quite possible that the number of people infected in various areas is in dispute. It's also possible that many purported AIDS cases in poorer countries are the result of misdiagnosis. Neither of which has any bearing on whether or not AIDS is caused by HIV.

As for the rest of your post, most of it is misleading:
HIV-1 and HIV-2 are more genetically similar to SIV strains in monkeys and chimps, respectively, than to each other.
Most strains of SIV don't cause signifigant symptoms in their normal hosts, but in a different host it often results in SAIDS.
SIV and HIV don't normally cross from or to humans because of single mutation in a key protein.

The reasonable conclusion to draw is that humans were protected from SIV strains by their protein difference, a new strain developed that got around that difference, infected a human, and because it's not in its normal host it causes immune difficiancy. Then this happened again with HIV-2.

Re:Duck and Cover

[Anonymous Coward]

for the original parent poster: people do know how the infection happens.
1) person aquires a couple hundred virons in their bloodstream, all of which have a plasma membrane envelope surrounding viron
2) special proteins in this envelope enable the it to merge with the plasma membrane of CD4 T Lymphoctyes (aka. t helper cells)
3) the reverse transcriptase that was packaged with the RNA inside the viron goes to work, transcribing DNA from the RNA of the AIDS virus (reverse transcriptase, et. al.)
4) endonucleases and other associate proteins (which also come in the viral package) insert the viral DNA into the host DNA.
5) Natural host protein manufacturing processes are directed by other viral mRNA sequences to produce huge quantities of both the viral DNA segment and the viral proteins.
6) new virons are packaged and then Pushed out of the plasma membrane of the CD4 cell. This reforms the virus complete with protein bearing envelope ready for infecting another CD4 cell
7) repeat x 1,000,000+
8) original CD4 cell runs out of spare plasma membrane, ruptures, and dies. (think of a firecracker in an orange)
9) A whole bunch more CD4 cells become infected, some are killed others the virus remains dormant (hence the dip in CD4 counts immediately post infection followed by their resurgance.
10) after X amount of time, the viral machinery reactivates and kills the CD4 cells, saturating the host with viral particles
11) Host loses cell-mediated immunity
12) Chaos ensues (AIDS)
13) By the time the patient succumbs to a secondary infection, the CD4 cells have been so depleted, that there aren't any left to produce any virus, so sometimes you see low viral loads at the time of death. Makes sense eh?

Just because You don't understand a thing doesn't mean that Noone understands a thing. I just hate all the tin-foil conspiricists. Go to Africa, watch villages die, come home and take your damn meds so we don't get even more resistant strains of HIV than we already have.

If you would like to call into question if we can really 'Know' any of these steps, you are calling into question the entirity of modern medical science. If you really want to know, take an immunology class (and the prerequisite basic biology class) at your local college. These will hopefully prove to you beyond a doubt the usefullness of the biochemical tools used to come to these conclusions regarding this retrovirus's lifecycle.

Also, please note that watson & crick stole the original data for their DNA research. Do you not belive that DNA is a double helix? Because that was based on stolen evidence too. Of course, they later reproved it a hojillion times, but the same thing has happened with HIV->AIDS.

Regarding those original quotes, most are grossly out of context and the few that are factual, I'm sure the original persons would not be happy to see their words twisted so badly.

Re:Duck and Cover

[Anonymous Coward]

if NYT = New York Times, you really don't have a clue what you're talking about.
The First time the medical research communitiy will be swayed by the new york times, Hell will have a solid layer of permafrost. Everybody looks forward with myrth to see what the popular media will butcher today. :) Nobody goes with the NYT. Popular opinion, yes, medical peer-review research, heck no.

If you're so freakin smart, tell us in 3 paragraphs the crux of the HIV->AIDS problem. You don't have to present evidence. The peer-reveiew argument is specious and falls appart at the breifest of investigation.

If your problem is with a sublty of circular logic, then that could easily be conveyed in 2 sentences. Put up or shut up dude.

Re:Duck and Cover

[khallow]

I agree with the grandparent. Proof by book is unacceptable around here for good reason. You're asking us to use up hours of our life merely on your say-so. My take also is that a complex, lengthy argument that can't be summarized in a succinct way is usually wrong. In other words the argument has to be lengthy and complex in order to lose (intentionally or not) the flaws in the argument.

Re:Duck and Cover

[Anonymous Coward]

The website you keep refering to has glaring innaccuracies.
#1) "Viruses typically cause disease shortly after infection, before the immune system of their host can respond. There is no other example of a viral pathogen which causes primary disease only after long and unpredictable latent periods, only in the presence of neutralizing antibodies, and in the virtual absence of gene expression, as HIV is said to do."
Rebuttal: This scientific source has never heard of Zoster? Chickenpox as a kid leads to Shingles in adults. Same virus. Retrovirus infact. Like all herpes viruses. Retroviruses. That same website claims retroviruses don't cause disease.
#2) Hemophiliac #'s haven't been changed in the US. This is also totally false. We've killed of massive numbers of hemophiliacs secondary to HIV infection from contaminated blood. Look at the statistics youself, your website is total crap.

Frankly, I think you're the one being arrogant, no one else has:
A) bragged about their IQ.
B) called an enormous number of researchers out as being fakes or fools without providing a shred of debatable evidence to back up your claims.
C) operating under assumptions you clearly don't fully understand and using that misunderstanding to give advice that is harmful to others.
Sounds like textbook arrogance to me.

Re:Duck and Cover

[RsG]

Ay, I agree with you here. And I suppose I hadn't thought about that angle for the gay-bashers - blaming the infected I mean. To be fair, many of the vehemently anti-gay people I've met personally do beleive in the whole "God's punishment" garbage, so I'd kinda assumed that they wouldn't care what specifically causes the disease, as long as it targets a group their religion condemns. I'd forgotten that not all homophobes are religious.

But my basic point remains - the AIDS controversy and surrounding pseudoscience is different from the examples listed at the beginning of this thread (Lysenkoism, creationism and social darwinism). A few crackpots believing that HIV does not cause AIDS is not the same as a powerful individual or organization forcing pseudoscience on the masses to support its agenda. I guess the difference I see is that pseudoscience like Lysenkoism really can be damaging (it set back the biological science in Russia by decades).

It's a matter of scale or severity; bad science in the name of homeopathy can do a little bit of damage, whereas bad science in the name of political ideology or religion can do a lot of damage.

Re:Duck and Cover

[rbarreira]

Or maybe you threw some fireworks before the party began. Check again.

Re:Duck and Cover

[rbarreira]

And I wonder if that crazy wacko doctor is going around infecting people with HIV, even though he doesn't show the symptoms of the disease yet. Or maybe he only pretended to jab himself with the needle and actually didn't...

Re:Duck and Cover

[Anonymous Coward]

That article doesn't proof postulate nr. 3. For the Florida cases look at:
http://www.annals.org/cgi/content/full/124/2/250

In general it's not clear how it could be proven in practice, since no one is going to let himself inject with HIV for a nice clean trial.

If the people were treated with something like AZT, they will develop AIDS, since the common drugs used for AIDS treatment will destroy the immune system (among a long list of other stuff, side effects include blood cell damage and lower white blood cell count).

There certainly is a strong correlation between HIV and AIDS, but it hasn't been shown that HIV is not just a marker and actually causes AIDS.

Re:Duck and Cover

[Syrrh]

You keep throwing that virusmyth website out- You do realize that right there at the top it's got an "S" replaced by a dollar sign? Nothing screams 'crackpot persecution conspiracy' quite like that does.

Re:Duck and Cover

[yndrd1984]

A few crackpots believing that HIV does not cause AIDS is not the same as a powerful individual or organization forcing pseudoscience on the masses to support its agenda.

I agree with that, but only in a quantitative sense. The scale of the damage may be different, but the motivation is that same.

But I thought...

[$RANDOMLUSER]

That this was a slow gestating virus that could lie dormant for years before going into reproductive mode. How does 180 days of "apparent" immunity (with no control group?!?) make a valid experiment?

Re:But I thought...

[Pedrito]

That this was a slow gestating virus that could lie dormant for years before going into reproductive mode. How does 180 days of "apparent" immunity (with no control group?!?) make a valid experiment?

Actually, that's not really the case. HIV actually replicates very quickly after infection. Even though one may not show symptoms for many years, that's unusual. Most people develop the first symptoms within weeks of getting the virus. But with or without symptoms, signs of the virus can be found very quickly, particularly in the lymphatic system.

Do not confuse HIV infection and symptoms with AIDS. One isn't considered to have AIDS until their T-Cell count falls below 200 cells per uL. This is usually the point where the person starts developing the kinds of diseases that normally don't affect healthy people. Before that point, you still has a tendency to get sick from a number of more common illnesses.

Re:But I thought...

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly, look at magic johnson. Did everyone forget about him

First Phase of AIDS Vaccine Trials Successful

[McGiraf]

Fuck!

Re:First Phase of AIDS Vaccine Trials Successful

[Anonymous Coward]

that made me laugh out loud... no mod points, or you'd get one.

Re:First Phase of AIDS Vaccine Trials Successful

[QRDeNameland]

"I dunno how much AIDS scare y'all, but I got a theory - the day they come out with a cure for AIDS. Guaranteed, one-shot cure. On that day, there's gonna be fucking in the streets, man. It's over! Who're you? C'mere! What's your name, baby? No, it's over, yeah, woo-hoo! Man, if you can't get laid on that day, cut it off."

-- Bill Hicks

Re:First Phase of AIDS Vaccine Trials Successful

[McGiraf]

That will be a great day for herpes, siphylis, crabs, pregnancies, clamedia ....

Re:First Phase of AIDS Vaccine Trials Successful

[MarkRose]

That will be a great day for herpes, siphylis, crabs, pregnancies, clamedia ....

I felt a disturbance in the force. It is as if the fantasies of millions of slashdotters were suddenly silenced.

Re:First Phase of AIDS Vaccine Trials Successful

[jgs]

Not to mention hepatitis-C, which is another blood-borne, debilitating (usually) or fatal (CDC says 1-5%) disease spread pretty much the same way as HIV... and which is 4x more prevalent than HIV in the U.S. population.

Re:First Phase of AIDS Vaccine Trials Successful

[RsG]

siphylis, clamedia

Both of which are already curable with antibiotics.

crabs, pregnancies

Both are just minor passengers. The former goes away with treatment, the latter after 9 months or less. Reminds me of an old joke: "Life, an STD that's 100% fatal in all who contract it".

herpes

This is the one I'd worry about. It's still incurable and more contagious than any of the others in your list.

However, stop and think about this for a second. If we can cure HIV/AIDS, then we've found a way to expunge the body of a retrovirus. Compared to that, how hard would it be to get rid of something like herpes? They're both viral, and AFAIK herpes doesn't have the immune system complications, or the tendancy to mutate, that HIV does.

Re:First Phase of AIDS Vaccine Trials Successful

[42Penguins]

How many strains/simplexes of herpes are there compared to HIV?

Re:First Phase of AIDS Vaccine Trials Successful

[beheaderaswp]

Regarding herpes, the negativity of this is more socially imposed rather than from a health standpoint or true medical concern.

The fact of the matter is that a majority of us have herpes of some type (cold sores)- except that infection is not on our genitals.

Personally, I fail to see the alarming hysteria regarding herpes as anything other than social stigma. Social stigmas can be pretty strong, but not life threatening. So my guess is that the herpes stigma these days, is about as powerful as the inter-racial marriage stigma of the 50's.

So I don't see herpes as much of an issue at all. It might be nice to be able to clear an infection medically, but living with it is not a heavy burden. Unless of course the generally held opinions of society (which are wrong) really bother you.

So while one might hope to avoid herpes (and should), herpes is one disease that needs to have it's demonization removed. The only reason the infection get's any play in people's minds is because it's on your genitalia.

So in effect herpes gets stigmatized for the same reasons that some people laugh at "penis jokes".

Re:First Phase of AIDS Vaccine Trials Successful

[beheaderaswp]

Thank God!

I know that a majority of our government needs to get laid right-freaking-now!

Re:First Phase of AIDS Vaccine Trials Successful

[Prune]

You missed the incurable, debilitating, and sometimes fatal hepatitis C.

Re:First Phase of AIDS Vaccine Trials Successful

[daft_one]

And the fact it means regular, annoying sores for the rest of your life... And blindness if it somehow gets in your eyes. No, you're right, herpes means well.

Re:First Phase of AIDS Vaccine Trials Successful

[RsG]

Yes, I did. I focused on the diseases listed by the person I replied to, and he never mentioned hep C. I suppose we both forgot to include it.

Re:First Phase of AIDS Vaccine Trials Successful

[dhasenan]

Herpes increases your risk of getting cervical cancer.

Well, okay, maybe not YOUR risk, but still.

Re:First Phase of AIDS Vaccine Trials Successful

[Anonymous Coward]

regarding herpes as not a heavy burden: unless you are single

Re:First Phase of AIDS Vaccine Trials Successful

[Murphy Murph]

Herpes does a very good job of hiding in spinal nerve tissue when dormant. It is likely a harder virus than HIV to remove from the body entirely.

Re:First Phase of AIDS Vaccine Trials Successful

[sydres]

have you ever even seen the herpes blister that develops on a regular basis because if not go to google and search for the pictures then come back and talk about social stigmas

Re:First Phase of AIDS Vaccine Trials Successful

[humble.fool]

Can't herpes make you sterile? That seems rather important from a medical standpoint to me.

Re:First Phase of AIDS Vaccine Trials Successful

[ceoyoyo]

To add to the other guy's list, if you're going to accept herpes... hepatitis.

I usually try not to go around getting cold sores either. Periodic sores on my face OR my genitals just don't sound like fun.

Re:First Phase of AIDS Vaccine Trials Successful

[Kuvter]

Did this ruin your plans or were you just telling us them?

Re:First Phase of AIDS Vaccine Trials Successful

[NateTech]

I guess we'll tell that to people who contracted Herpes Simplex encephalitis which is 70% fatal without treatment and 20% fatal even when treated. Like other Herpes outbreaks, it can then come and go, attacking the brain.

Similarly unborn children are at risk of neonatal herpes simplex contracted from the mother, which is fatal in 25% of cases.

While both of these are relatively rare, Herpes is a real disease, not just a social stigma. You need to learn more about it.

Re:First Phase of AIDS Vaccine Trials Successful

[potat0man]

herpes, siphylis, crabs, pregnancies, clamedia...

Yeah, my mom caught pregnancies 3 times when I was a kid. Now my brothers are the three biggest walking STD's you've ever seen.

Re:First Phase of AIDS Vaccine Trials Successful

[badhack]

Social stigma aside, herpes is still no laughing matter. Herpes can kill newborn babies who become infected during birth. Google it.

Re:First Phase of AIDS Vaccine Trials Successful

[just fiddling around]

Well, the guaranteed one-shot cure exists, but nobody would want to use it more than once. It's a "next morning" cure that has to be taken 72 hours after exposition at most.

It's supposedly NOT funny to use, with serious side-effects lasting for a month, but it works well and is used by professionals in case of accidental exposure to infected blood.

Re:First Phase of AIDS Vaccine Trials Successful

[beheaderaswp]

The only thing I can say is this:

The flu kills more people that herpes EVER has, probably on a yearly basis.

It's stigma, and you guys have made my point. You've pulled out every extreme medical niche that herpes fits into.

Nice. Not logical or well reasoned... but helpful to my points. Thank you!

Re:First Phase of AIDS Vaccine Trials Successful

[BluedemonX]

A vaccine is not a cure. It's a prophylactic.

If you can PREVENT AIDS it doesn't mean you can cure herpes.

Now, the day when you can get a jab that guarantees you get neither AIDS nor herpes, then you really will get screwing in the streets. And Africa's population will go up by a factor of ten.

Re:First Phase of AIDS Vaccine Trials Successful

[ivan256]

It's a stigma for a good reason. It reflects on your sexual practices. If you've got it, you are probably pretty loose, and aren't the type to be monogamous even to the point where you stick around long enough to find out if your partner has a disease before you have sex and move on to your next partner. Generally, it's a fairly good indication of whether somebody will make a good life-long mate.

Lots of things that have a negative social stigma are your evolved instictive ability to choose a good mate working correctly.

Re:First Phase of AIDS Vaccine Trials Successful

[beheaderaswp]

A vague generalization which is meaningless.

It's about as ignorant as "Oh you have AIDS- you must be a homo". Over 50% of Americans have some form of Herpes.

That statistically includes 50% of your family, the people you date, and perhaps even you. Doctors these days are actually MORE concerned with the spread of Herpes Simplex 1 because people don't think about it being a sexually transmitted disease- but it can be.

So if you're wife has ever had a cold sore, you might want to divorce her (she's too loose), or alternatively- remain celebate.

You made my point for me yet again.

Re:First Phase of AIDS Vaccine Trials Successful

[ivan256]

The only point that you've made is that you're an idiot.

Vague generalizations are the primary mechinism that people have for rapid decision making. Obviously, when you get to know somebody better, you can make a more nuanced decision, but stereotypes exist for a reason. In this case, those reasons are the same reasons that give genital herpes a greater stigma than cold sores.

Saying that you're right doesn't make you right. Go think you're brilliant though. Get yourself infected. Have fun with that. You'll have a gift that keeps on giving, and a hard time finding a steady relationship.

Re:First Phase of AIDS Vaccine Trials Successful

[ivan256]

Yeah, I know. I've replied to this comment before, and I replied to you down below too. I want to reply to you again though, because reading your comment again revealed something absolutely moronic.

The flu kills more people that herpes EVER has, probably on a yearly basis.

The flu kills more people every year than self inflicted gunshot blasts to the head too. Guess how much meaning that little "statistic" has. Here's a hint. It's exactly the same amount of meaning that yours has. If I use the same logic as you did to come up with your point, clearly I should stop trying to avoid people with the flu to prevent getting infected because, after all, it's not as bad as getting shot in the head.

I suspect that you're just bitter because nobody bothers to try and find a cure for your herpes since pills to reduce the symptoms are more profitable, and every elegable partner that you meet and think you might want to settle down with won't touch your crotch with a 10 foot pole.

And just to batter your 'points' to smaller bits, using your example from a comment below... A genital herpes infection is a co-factor in the transmission of HIV, and a high percentage of people who contract HIV sexualy also have genital herpes. If all the other reasons aren't good enough for you, perhaps when you realize your potential partner has herpes you should be wondering what else you're going to catch from them too.

Incidentally, Herpes Simplex 2 *can* kill you, and kills many newborn children born to infected mothers every year. Not only is your flu 'statistic' stupid, but it's probably wrong too.

Re:First Phase of AIDS Vaccine Trials Successful

[beheaderaswp]

And the trump card...

Ya know, my wife has herpes. And either I'm a fool, or she's the most wonderful woman in the world.

You're right. I'm stupid for pissing my life away.

I'm a moron... I suck.

Will your church accept me?

Raca!

Re:First Phase of AIDS Vaccine Trials Successful

[ivan256]

Yeah, that's a trump card. Sure. Like it wasn't transparent or anything that you had a bias. It was clear that either you or an S.O. was infected.

You have now, helped validate my point. Thank you.

Anarchy is here....

[Anonymous Coward]

Burn that rubber, take off that clothe and pile up.... 70s orgies are coming back......

HIV-Goatse.cx.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Does it work though? Have these people been exposed properly to HIV and did they really reist picking it up?"

Apparently it went in very easily.

"All it takes is one night in the wrong club at the wrong time and no matter what kind of protection you have -- it could be too late."

The "Bannanas in pajamas" guys when under attack just split.

Booster shots?

[tacarat]

I'm curious if this vaccine is being set up for one-time immunizations with possible booster shots, or if it'll be a more frequent thing like the flu shots. One of the vexing traits of HIV is it's rapid mutation rate. The flu and cold viruses are pretty much the same.

"Spring break is coming up! Get your annual HIV immunizations here!"

The only real downside is that if this (or another) vaccine is effective and reliable, then there's the risk of other STDs becoming more prevelant again as people relax their safe sex practices. That includes unplanned pregnancies. Some people really do need a hypothetical gun to their heads to think about using condoms or monogamy.

Re:Booster shots?

[Short Circuit]

The only real downside is that if this (or another) vaccine is effective and reliable, then there's the risk of other STDs becoming more prevelant again as people relax their safe sex practices. That includes unplanned pregnancies. Some people really do need a hypothetical gun to their heads to think about using condoms or monogamy.

Hate to burst your bubble, but most people I know don't use condoms to avoid disease, they use them to avoid pregnancy. Condoms only reduce the transmission of a subset of STDs. Crabs and herpes are just a couple of examples that condoms won't block.

Re:Booster shots?

[tacarat]

Hate to burst your bubble, but most people I know don't use condoms to avoid disease, they use them to avoid pregnancy. Condoms only reduce the transmission of a subset of STDs. Crabs and herpes are just a couple of examples that condoms won't block.

No bubble burst, and you're right about the STD transmission. I'm still fairly sure that rates on the applicable (condom blocked) STD rates may go up, even if it's not a skyrocket. Pregnancy isn't an issue for gay men, nor is it an issue if the female partner in a heterosexual relationship is on another form of contraceptive. Exposure to something by either partner puts the other at risk. STD safety and awareness isn't really hyped in US media outlets aside from HIV. When's the last time they held a fund raiser or march for people with syphilus or genital warts?

Re:Booster shots?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Some people really do need a hypothetical gun to their heads to think about using condoms or monogamy."
this isnt a hypothetical gun. this is a disease that has killed 25 million people.
no one needs a hypothetical or literal gun to thier head to convince them to follow outdated judeochristian customs like monogamy. how is it that monogamy is inherantly so much more correct that people require the threat of deadly stds to follow that lifestyle?

I predict the christian/right-wingers will delay and even attempt to block an aids vaccine on simularly skewed moral grounds. where hells fire wont work the moralists use fear ov diseases like aids to push thier antisex agenda. (sex before marriaqge, sex other than for procreation)

anyone recal the recent delay on the hpv vaccine?
hpv is responsible for 90% of the cases of cervical cancer in womenwhich worldwide causes death in about 39000 a year.
in the media i heard there were concerns that if this vaccine were available in the united states that youth would abandon abstinance and no sex before marriage promises. some people would rahter that 39000 women die each year ov a preventable disease than accept the likelihood that teenagers today arent like to wait until their are married.

Re:Booster shots?

[Short Circuit]

What's really needed is sex-ed refresher courses throughout highschool and college. Beyond that fifteen-minute video in middle school (Which students could be excused from if it bothered them) and a forty minutes of instruction in four years of high school, nobody in the educational system has bothered to teach me anything about STDs and safe and unsafe sex practices.

Well, you learn a little in the First Aid class, but I had to pay for that...

The media is for entertainment, not education. (Seriously, even political talking heads are merely entertainers with a political focus.) And STDs need to be about education, not entertainment.

Hm. I wonder if I could get one of the student organizations at my college to offer gifts to anyone who presents proof that they've recently had an STD test battery.

Re:Booster shots?

[tacarat]

I agree. Education and availablity of protection needs to be increased. When I was in the military, our dorm/barracks manager left her door open and had a big bowl of condoms that people could swipe one or two from with just a quick grab from the hall. I think college campuses could benefit from vending machines with condoms in them as well. The ones that sell gum as well as soda would do well. The only trick is to lower the cost. $1 for a rubber might pass at the club, but I think they should just be a $0.25-0.50 each from a regular vending machine. A smaller margin in exchange for more sales and a healthier (or less pregnant) campus wouldn't be so bad.

As for high school... parents with religous objections need to realize that sexual urges begin at puberty, not the alter. Teaching their kids the real facts about sex and emotional intimacy would be a lot better than letting them figure it out themselves or trying to find "loopholes" in thier belief systems.

Off topic note: Help out Melanie Martineze. Her role in the Technical Virgin PSA parodies have gotten her fired from a job that she was doing very well at. Find more info at http://bringbackmel.blogspot.com

Re:Booster shots?

[tacarat]

"Some people really do need a hypothetical gun to their heads to think about using condoms or monogamy."

this isnt a hypothetical gun. this is a disease that has killed 25 million people.

Until they or somebody they know gets an unexpected pregnancy, HIV or some other bugaboo, it's hypothetical to them. The whole "it won't happen to me" mentality is still very much alive. Examples include crashed drunk drivers, bikers that think they don't need helmets/leathers or the person that leaves unsecured guns where children can get them. By the way, good numbers. For your comment on monogamy, I'm sure you could probably name more than a few people that are mature and responsible enough to handle multiple partners. Great for them. The comment was geared more for those that can't get a handle on responsible, monogamous sexual relations and wasn't intended to purport one lifestyle being flat out better than the other.

I liked your insight about special interest groups and their agendas working against the interest of the general public. Bad stuff, that. Still, it's more than just right-wingers. For the most part, though, I agree with your post. No need for AC, I think, but that's just me (public terminals suck!).

Re:Booster shots?

[randyest]

Crabs and herpes are just a couple of examples that condoms won't block.

Wait . . . what?!

Condoms don't block herpes?! Oh shi

Re:Booster shots?

[Short Circuit]

Herpes doesn't just affect the part of the body that condoms are designed for. Nearby surfaces can get infected and transmit the disease as well. And that's not even mentioning fellatio.

Gah...I hate being specific about sex on Slashdot...makes me think someone's going to mod me down.

Re:Booster shots?

[MonkWB]

Fuck monogamy.

Re:Booster shots?

[tacarat]

Now that's what I call a plan with potential!

Re:Booster shots?

[CEMM]

My university has condom vending machines in all the bathrooms, and passes free ones out like candy during Orientation week. But, sadly, the O'Week condoms are more often than not turned into baloon animals or volley-balls and the condoms in the vending machines are so frighteningly out of date that using toilet paper could possibly be safer. (Disclaimer: Dont try this at home. Seriously.) They've got the idea right...just not proper implementation.

Umm ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ummm ...

I hate to be a dink, but we've had a way to completely control this infection for about 20 years now; it's called abstainence. On top of that we have a way to limit the risk of infection down to a minimal level for just as long; its called a condom and limiting sexual relations with casual partners. Why is it important to develop a way to allow people who have little regard for their own health to remain healthy?

Re:Umm ...

[RsG]

Right, because nobody ever caught aids without having unprotected sex with strangers first. Not one single person, nope. (/sarcasm off)

What about blood transfusions, broken condoms, infected partners that picked it up via adultery, rape victims and dumb kids who don't know any better (since we don't teach them safe sex, and they're too hormoned-up not to fuck)? That doesn't even get into the mess over in Africa. Are you seriously prepared to condemn every single infected person simply due to the fact that many of the dying got that way from carelessness?

An ounch of prevention is worth a pound of cure. That doesn't mean however that you can always prevent bad things from happening, or that we shouldn't care enough to try and find a cure.

And by the way, your arguement can be twisted for just about anything. Why should we try to develop a cure for cancer? Those people should have known to get themselves checked up (many cancers can be detected early, via screening, thereby removing the need for any miracle cure), and should have known to avoid carcinogens (do you check everything you eat?). Yet to take that stance both condemns people for honest mistakes, and condemns the blamelessly unlucky along with the careless by denying them a cure as well.

Re:Umm ...

[KDR_11k]

Because people would like it if they didn't have to restrict their lifestyle because of AIDS?

Re:Umm ...

[MustardMan]

Because some people don't want to live their lives by your puritanical values?

Re:Umm ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you seriously prepared to condemn every single infected person

Yes, he is. He is a Christian.

Re:Umm ...

[alfs boner]

we've had a way to completely control this infection for about 20 years now; it's called abstainence.

*snrk* hahahahahaahahahahahahahaaahahahahaahahaahahahahah ahahaahaahahahahahahaahaaahahahahahahahahahahaaaah ahahahahaahahahahahahaaaahahahaahahahhahahahahahha hahahhhaaaahahahahaaahaahaahahahahaha...

You lose :)

Re:Umm ...

[jgs]

I hate to be a dink

Doesn't show.

Why is it important to develop a way to allow people who have little regard for their own health to remain healthy?

Because compassion is one of the things that makes us human?

(Leaving aside cold-blooded economic arguments about how you'd much rather have healthy productive workers contributing to your economy than sick people who are draining it. AIDS doesn't make business sense.)

Re:Umm ...

[yndrd1984]

Why is it important to develop a way to allow people who have little regard for their own health to remain healthy?

For the same reason we developed seatbelts, bulletproof vests and the cooking of meat. Sure, people can avoid being in motor vehicles, professions where they're likely to get shot at in and not eat pork, but that curtails their lives tremendously.

On the other hand, what kind of idiot argues that a safety measure shouldn't be developed?. The "let 'em die" attitude is rather uncivilized.

Re:Umm ...

[annakin]

>Right, because nobody ever caught aids without having unprotected sex with strangers first.

Actually, care to cite some research showing that someone has in fact contracted AIDS from physical contact?

If all your research shows is that someone picked up HIV from someone else, that's not enough. I'm sure HIV gets passed around. But then you have to show that HIV develops into AIDS, which is a lot harder.

Good luck, by the way. People have been working on this for 30 years.

Re:Umm ...

[istartedi]

Ummm... the same reason we talk people down off bridges and high buildings? Compassion, maybe? Not to mention the fact that these people end up with others who are more responsable, and simply don't know their partners are infected. Really though, even though you're being modded Troll, you've got a point; but just leaving people to twist in the wind isn't moral from my point of view. We really need to eliminate the attitude of fatalism that some people have, especially young people. You see a lot of articles where people have the attitude of "it's only a matter of time before I get it". Before we can use any of the methods you describe to stop HIV, we need to figure out how to stop fatalism. We also need to stamp out arrogance. You hear a lot of people who think that HIV is a manageable illness like diabetes or herpes. It isn't. Like all successful vices, it buries those who would testify otherwise.

Re:Umm ...

[beheaderaswp]

Umm... From the context of knowing a great deal about the Gay community, due to family connections, people do restrict their sexual activity a great deal due to HIV. They don't like it, but most do restrict their activities.

Re:Umm ...

[Dachannien]

I'd also like to be able to walk down the middle of the freeway without getting hit and killed. So, everyone stop driving, dammit!

Re:Umm ...

[evilviper]

Although you are certainly being a complete "dink", you COULD have had a point, if you had put a little more thought into it.

What bothers me is the fact that HIV/AIDS research is getting an inordinately large ammount of funding (both public and private). Other diseases, which kill many more people, are getting much less funding than HIV/AIDS research.

And, yes, AIDS is 99.99+% preventable over all, and 98% preventable, even if you continue to be extremely promiscuous (but use a condom). Yet many other diseases, which kill more people, are NOT preventable at all, or at least not in any reasonable way.

Even a disease like lung cancer has a much higher than 2% chance (IIRC) of infecting an individual who has never smoked in their life. That, despite the fact that lung cancer gets inordinately less funding than other diseases, because it is looked upon as taboo, and a preventable disease.

Why AIDS has such incredibly special status, has long been a mystery to me.

Re:Umm ...

[roman_mir]

abstinence from what? How about dentists/doctors/nurses/policemen/firemen who have to work with HIV positive people and thus are in risk of getting the infection? How about kids, who were born to HIV positive mothers/fathers? Are those people responsible for what happens to them?

Rape victims, straight folks, who have accidents with broken condoms? Blood transfusion?

What happens when HIV becomes airborn and spreads like flu virus?

Re:Umm ...

[KDR_11k]

I'm not referring to gays, just people who have sex with many different partners and don't want to live in constant fear of AIDS, be they gay, straight or redneck.

Re:Umm ...

[KDR_11k]

If there was a vaccine against car accidents, wouldn't you take it?

Re:Umm ...

[Tom]

I hate to be a dink, but we've had a way to completely control this infection for about 20 years now; it's called abstainence.

I can reassure you, you aren't a dink. You're an ignorant asshole.

Ever heard of the hundreds of ways you can get infected without sex? Blood transfusions were a common vector in the early days, before everyone got paranoid about them, for example. You can still get the virus through blood, for example during an accident (with you as the victim, or you as the helper who doesn't wear protective clothes). Lots of kids are infected, and unless you believe they had sex at 3 or so, I'll go with the more reasonable option that their parents were infected.

There are other, less common ways as well.

So no, abstinence isn't a solution. It's just some meme that some people want to spread and they use every opportunity to sell it. If you ask the right people, abstinence probably cures acne and cancer as well, and leads to better eyesight and higher salaries.

Re:Umm ...

[Builder]

Ummm... the same reason we talk people down off bridges and high buildings?

It's killjoys like you who are ruining B.A.S.E for the rest of us!

Re:Umm ...

[Quiet_Desperation]

abstinence probably cures acne and cancer as well, and leads to better eyesight and higher salaries

I can personally attest that the last two are not the case. :(

Re:Umm ...

[lachlan76]

We take the time to build footpaths rather than telling people not to walk. Taking the vaccine does not cause problems for others like stopping people from driving would.

Re:Umm ...

[lachlan76]

Most Christians are waiting in hope for an AIDS virus so that all those people won't need to suffer and die. He is just an asshat.

Blood samples

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not a doctor, but I assume they would just expose blood samples to the virus and observe whether the virus is able successfully attack cells & reproduce, rather than expose the people themselves to HIV. By observing under a microscope the virus' activity, they wouldn't need to wait years for the effects to become observable.

IP

[Anonymous Coward]

"China's research into AIDS vaccines has been going on for 15 years but the country does not have the intellectual property rights over its AIDS vaccines in trial and the research has limited global influence, the report said."

So even if it works, the WIPO will see to it that we wait for a working vaccine without IP issue?

Re:IP

[BiggerIsBetter]

Or maybe those who do hold "IP" in the rest of the world should get their shiny asses into gear and actually *use* their "IP" for something constructive. If China has an HIV vaccine that won't be available in the US/EU/AP because of silly legalities, I'd expect a fairly large scale protest, and at a mimium, large scale public disobedience. And a boom to the Chinese tourist industry.

Re:IP

[Anonymous Coward]

FWIW, China doesn't issue visas to people with certain diseases, AIDS included. For a simple tourist visa all they do is ask you and as far as I can tell they never follow up on people who say they're negative, so I suppose lying is an option in that case. For a work visa, an actual test is required.

They test for a host of diseases, not just AIDS. One of them involved sticking a large Q-tip in my dickhole. Jesus christ that hurt like a bitch.

Just think about that for a moment... the cotton fibers on the end aren't soft. They scrape.

*shudder*

Lack of information

[Mutatis Mutandis]

The actual press release is more cautious than the excerpt that is quoted here; describing the result of the trials as saying that the vaccine is "safe and possibly effective." Apparently there were no ill effects, and if I interpret the text correctly, they detected antibodies against whatever these people were injected with. Which does not prove at all that the vaccine could be effective, because the envelope proteins of HIV are so variable that buidling up immunity is enormously difficult. However, it is probably as much as one could reasonably hope for in this first phase of trials.

That said, there is nothing in this press release to suggest that this vaccine trial will have a better outcome than the series of failed trials that have already preceded it. Mainly because there is very little information in this press release at all. Obviously, it was written by someone who did not have a clue about the science behind the trials; you can't tell from this what the vaccine consists of and how it is supposed to work. More worryingly, the "director of the National Institute for the Control of Pharmaceutical and Biological Products" is quoted as saying that "The HIV-1 specific cells injected into the recipients were the DNA fragments of the virus which don't cause infection." Which is nonsensical enough to suggest that the aforementioned director, who held the press conference, doesn't have a clue either. Probably he is more remarkable for his political skills than his medical ability.

But maybe these Chinese researchers are on the right track -- who knows? A vaccine against HIV is very much needed, and the hope that we will be able to create one seems to shrink with every new failure.

Re:Lack of information

[benicillin]

To clarify what this very eloquent yet seemingly retarded contributor previously wrote: The director clearly knows what he is talking about. Test subjects were injected with parts of the virus that don't cause infection so as to NOT INFECT THEM!!! with the virus. Instead, they were given non-infectuous parts of it so that the body would be able to recognize the virus if it were to come into contact with the system later. This is the whole point of vaccines.

I am willing to bet these patients would be somewhat unhappy if they were given the infectuous portions of the disease.

Re:Lack of information

[Mutatis Mutandis]

Of course the patients where injected with parts of the virus that are not, in themselves, sufficient to cause disease.

The point is that, of course, cells are not part of a virus; cells are much bigger than as virus. Nor is DNA a part of a retrovirus such as HIV, which carries its genetic information in the form of RNA. Nor would it make sense to simply inject patients with parts of the genome, rather than selected (parts of) the proteins, in the hope that they would somehow develop immunity to proteins that are not even expressed.

So a phrase such as "The HIV-1 specific cells injected into the recipients were the DNA fragments of the virus which don't cause infection" betrays a painful lack of knowledge of virology and molecular biology, and gives no clue about the nature of the vaccine whatsoever.

Re:Lack of information

[ignacionyc]

I may be stupid... but... isn't it possible that translating from mandarin medical terminology into english medical terminology could be the reason HIV is being talked of in terms of cells and DNA? Could there be less stupidity in the world than once thought, and perhaps a lot more miscommunication?

Think about it

[Anonymous Coward]

"Does it work though? Have these people been exposed properly to HIV and did they really reist picking it up?"

No, Cells taken from there body would have been tested.

""The recipients appeared immune to the HIV-1 virus 15 days after the injection, indicating the vaccine worked well in stimulating the body's immunity," Doesn't it take a little longer to know if HIV is going to take hold? "Immune" is a little presumptive at this point."

i think they mean sample's taken 15 days after the injection appeared immune.

"Obviously you can't simply expose the subjects to the pathogen causing the disesase (not ethically, anyway). Does anyone in a medical field happen to know how this works?"

I am do Dr, but they dont need to test *you* as such... they can test cells taken from you.

"That this was a slow gestating virus that could lie dormant for years before going into reproductive mode. How does 180 days of "apparent" immunity (with no control group?!?) make a valid experiment?"

There mean reactions to the vaccine, side effects.

Exactly

[Anonymous Coward]

Cancer's where research should be focused; AIDS is a political distraction.

Re:Exactly

[Anonymous Coward]

You assume that a huge dent in death rates is a good thing. I'll look forward to a cure to cancer the minute I develope a fetish for old people, and the birth rate falls to an acceptable level. Don't hold your breath.

Re:Exactly

[jgs]

I'll look forward to a cure to cancer the minute I develope a fetish for old people

Or the minute you're diagnosed with cancer yourself. Presumably your dislike for high birth rates doesn't extend to yourself, since there are ways you could take care of that ex post facto if you wanted to.

(By the way, there are plenty of cancers that mainly develop in young to middle-aged people. Two examples are testicular and breast cancer. I know a number of people in their 20's and 30's who've had cancer.)

Re:Exactly

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been diagnosed with a malign form of brain tumor this spring. I have been through brain surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy. None of this was particularly pleasant. Cancer will kill me anyway, within a couple of years at most, the doctors (and all sources I could find about the topic, online or in books) say.

I am 32. Maybe you're half my age and consider me "old people". I don't, yet. Looks like I never will.

The guy I wrote one of my first computer games with (for the C64 / Amiga, back in the 80s) died of leukaemia before he even reached 30, btw.

HIV test

[Kitten Killer]

I didn't see a journal article that corresponds to this clinical trial but I'd be interested to know if the use of this vaccine precludes later HIV testing.

For the non-biologists: vaccines are often based on exposing the body to a protein from the virus (but not the entire virus). In doing so, the body produces antibodies that recognize the protein. The next time the body sees the protein (i.e. when exposed to the actual virus), the body will be able to quickly destroy the virus particles before the person becomes infected.

However, a lot of tests for viral infection is based on the presence of the antibodies in blood. So, if the person has been immunized using the vaccine, the person will have those antibodies in blood, and it becomes difficult to tell whether the antibodies came as a result of vaccination or infection.

Re:HIV test

[Snootch]

However, a lot of tests for viral infection is based on the presence of the antibodies in blood. So, if the person has been immunized using the vaccine, the person will have those antibodies in blood, and it becomes difficult to tell whether the antibodies came as a result of vaccination or infection.

There are quite a few different tests for HIV - you're right, the primary test is antibody-related (a quick-n-dirty relative of the Western blot, followed up by an actual high-precision blot if the initial screening turns up positive), but there are alternatives based on testing for the actual genes.

In a nutshell, the sample is combined with a set of enzymes and primers that will replicate only a specific stretch of DNA (in this case, the HIV genome). If there is HIV in the blood, you'll end up with a lot of HIV DNA around the place, which you can then test for with fluorescent probes or something similar.

This type of method would not be affected by anything your immune system does, as it tests directly for the presence of the virus.

There's a list of the available tests, and a bunch of other information - mostly aimed at patients - here.

Re:HIV test

[Anonymous Coward]

HIV has tests for the virus. They are more expensive but can give results much faster and are very accurate. They're commonly used for blood donations where you can't exactly wait for the antibodies to form.

Re:HIV test

[Kitten Killer]

Yes, I agree. You could even do RT-PCR for virus specific sequences if you want, but the cost per test will make a lot of these tests impractical for screening purposes.

Re:HIV test

[Zepalesque]

Just to nit pick.

"So, if the person has been immunized using the vaccine..."

Vaccine's do not provide full immunity. Only viral exposure can provide full immunity.

Vaccination != Immunity

I Wish They Would Elaborate...

[clragon]

"The recipients appeared immune to the HIV-1 virus 15 days after the injection, indicating the vaccine worked well in stimulating the body's immunity," he told the press conference.
...
"The HIV-1 specific cells injected into the recipients were the DNA fragments of the virus which don't cause infection," [Sang Guowei] told Xinhua.

Biology is not my forte, but since the HIV-1 virus was made to NOT cause an infection, how would they know if the vaccine actually worked?

Re:I Wish They Would Elaborate...

[Anonymous Coward]

It would trigger the immune system as if it were a real infection by an armed batch of HIV-1.

Re:I Wish They Would Elaborate...

[annakin]

I'm not a space engineer, but how does a craft moving 40mph escape the moon's gravity?

I'm not an air force dispatcher, but how does a guy in a cave divebomb (or slidebomb, actually) the Pentagon forty minutes after the Pentagon knew it was under attack?

I'm not a doctor, but how do 200,000 soldiers (Newsday, two separate articles) all come down with the same disease in the same 3-day war?

Re:I Wish They Would Elaborate...

[Anonymous Coward]

Translation: "I'm a jabbering psychotic, screeching inane conspiracy theories on Slashdot.. People laugh at me. All the time."

Re:I Wish They Would Elaborate...

[Tsiangkun]

There are lots of ways to determine if the vaccine is effective without exposing the person to the virus.

One such way is to purify serum from the people, and use it as the primary anitibody on a western blot against HIV extracts.
Collect and compare the sera before and after the vaccinations.

If only the post vaccine sera can be used in a western blot to detect the HIV proteins, then the person has developed antibodies against the virus,
and the vaccine is effective at strengthening the immune system against the virus.

Re:I Wish They Would Elaborate...

[annakin]

So what you're saying is, astronauts did not report being at 1500ft altitude 18 seconds into their Apollo 17 liftoff. The Pentagon did not know it was under attack after the second plane strike. Newsday did not report on at least 2 occasions that the incidence of Gulf War Syndrome is close to 200,000.

Somehow I think you're going to have a hard time backing up those claims.

Re:I Wish They Would Elaborate...

[ElephanTS]

go for it annakin - I like the way you think

Re:I Wish They Would Elaborate...

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks. Anonymous modding (is there any other kind?) has burned this account for the day. Check out Loose Change and Mythbusters forums, they're a lot more fun.

  -annakin

lol

[alveraan]

you deserve some mod points, that was fucking funny

Re:lol

[McGiraf]

"you deserve some mod points"

yeh sure, they all say that, but I did not get any yet, it's unfair! :)

Re:lol

[alveraan]

patience my friend, patience.

This is only Phase 1 of 3

[CharonX]

First of all, this is only Phase 1 of 3.
Phase 1 in clinical trials is meant to make sure the drug in general is "safe" and to determine the maximum safe dosage.
Testing if the drug really works as expected, how effective it is etc. is done in Phases 2 and 3 with a much larger group, in double-blind experiments.
Still, before Phase 1 there were many other experiments - i.e. test with animals, computer simulations etc. - which must have shown some promise otherwise they wouldn't spend money on the human trials.

Re:49? = 7 * 7

[NotQuiteReal]

7 is a lucky number, just to be super lucky, they used 7 * 7!

Hmmm, this was China... I think 8 is the lucky number there. Never mind.

Well duh this IS Slashdot...

[Chaffar]

I hate to be a dink, but we've had a way to completely control this infection for about 20 years now; it's called abstinence

No need to preach abstinence here; we at Slashdot have been abstaining from sex all our lives (not by choice though :)

lovely

[r00t]

Herpes is life-long.
Warts can keep coming back, and they give you cancer.
Plenty of "curable" things leave you (or your baby) with permanent damage.

The question: Money vs. Patents vs. The people

[dark-br]

Are we going to see this kind of vaccine deployed where it's mostly needed, in the poor african countries that cannot afford to pay by the nose for it? I don't think so... and if some of those 3rd world countries who happen to have the technology to fabricate it when it's done dare to do so (as Brazil has been doing for a long time with many anti HIV drugs) the pharmaceutical industry will go mental. You know... first the money, our patents, then, if it's reeeeally necessary the well-being of others.

Re:The question: Money vs. Patents vs. The people

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't be retarded, if a vacine were ever created it would clearly be distributed freely by the UN or something.

People might profit from it, but not at the cost of lives.

Re:The question: Money vs. Patents vs. The people

[Anonymous Coward]

Your naivite is so refreshing.

about your sig

[Anonymous Coward]

Garnish Tasmania !

circular definition

[r00t]

The current definition of AIDS includes a finding of HIV. That's plain unfair.

We might just as well define a car accident to be a collision between vehicles which occurs when at least one of the drivers is drunk. Then we could say that all car accidents are caused by being drunk.

An immuno-deficiency can be caused by lots of things. Transplant patients take drugs to cause an Aquired Immuno-deficiency Syndrome. All transplants would have AIDS except that AIDS is defined to include a finding of HIV.

Suggesting that AIDS (the symptoms, not the defective definition) can be caused by non-HIV is perfectly reasonable. Clearly HIV is a big cause. Chemotherapy would be another cause.

Re:circular definition

[yndrd1984]

Clearly HIV is a big cause [of AIDS].

Then there's a bloody link, right!?!?!

A return on all those billions. I hope.

[Anonymous Coward]

The AIDS lobby was fantastically successful at scaring up funding which was earmarked for other research, so it's about time we actually saw a result.

Now maybe all those people who wrote weepy letters to the Village Voice will be able to go back to anonymously fucking each other up the ass in gay pr0n theaters without worrying about getting sick.

Hooray for science.

Oh, and maybe they'll share some of the meds with Africa if there's any left over...but I doubt it.

Re:A return on all those billions. I hope.

[FLEB]

Actually, I recall a study (posted here on Slashdot) said that dollar-for-dollar, AIDS research was the (one of the?) most useful and practical applications of the charitable dollar.

AYDS

[porkmusket]

I was overweight and embarrassed to go anyplace. AYDS helped me get back into a size 12.

Mod me off-topic, I don't care. That video is funny shit.

how many tested?

[yakumo.unr]

TFA says "Forty-nine healthy people who received the injection showed no severe adverse reactions after 180 days".

So.... how many healthy people who received the injection DID show adverse reactions?

nowhere says how many were actually tested.

Publicly traded?

[lowenstein]

Pharma name? There are some even Chinese companies listed on NYSE these days... is that Chinese company publicly traded? Well, its probably some "national people owned" China company... nevermind

Re:Publicly traded?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Chinese government is trying very hard to get rid of these nationalized companies, as their economy is still hurting due to all the non-preforming loans that were given to such behemoths during the socialist years. Nowadays their modus operandi is to have a company be publically traded, but have the government be a majority stockholder. This happens in lots of other places, too.

Of course the PRC financial markets are still so regulated that it really doesn't make much of a difference, but it's still a step in the right direction.

Safety, not Efficacy

[adam.conf]

I cannot be the only one to have noticed that the results of this trial do NOT indicate that the vaccine is effective in protecting against the HIV virus. The trial patients were not ever injected with live HIV viruses.

All that has been demonstrated is that the vaccine doesn't have an immediate lethality in a small group of (presumably) ethnically similary people. They placed HIV virsues in blood samples obtained from these people, and the blood mounted an immune response. I'd like to point out that even people dieing of AIDS demonstrate an immune response to the HIV virus -- this is the very nature of the ELISA test used to diagnose the disease! Further, a demonstrated "immunity" in a small sample of blood is nothing; the body demonstrated immunity to the disease, often for the better part of a decade, before dying of it during the normal course of HIV/AIDS.

So, while any development towards a vaccine for the HIV virus is unquestionably a good things, lets not read too far into this.

Ack! All I know is that...

[Anonymous Coward]

...I feel sorry for those that were in the control group.

Lies: I call BS

[Anonymous Coward]

AIDS is not a virus. It is a syndrome. You cannot vaccinate against a syndrome. Although HIV is a virus, there is no scientifically proven link that HIV infected people will develop AIDS. Correlation is not proof. People who test "HIV positive" are in reality HIV negative, because like every other virus test, they are detecting the presence of anti-bodies which show that your body is dealing (or has dealt) with the virus. As with any other virus, the detection of anti-bodies would conclude that the virus has been dealt to.

Re:Lies: I call BS

[annakin]

You're right. Now why don't you post logged-in so you can increase your credibility?

What else can I add...AZT is a failed chemotherapy from the 1960's, regarded as highly toxic until it was approved for AIDS therapy. AZT is known as a "chain terminator" which means it indiscriminantly attacks all DNA in the body.

People who go on AZT die. Very quickly, in fact.

I wonder if Magic Johnson is taking his meds? Somehow I tend to doubt it.

AIDS!

[XnavxeMiyyep]

"The recipients appeared immune to the HIV-1 virus 15 days after the injection, indicating the vaccine worked well in stimulating the body's immunity."

But if they weren't immune, they would have gotten AIDS!

Greater China

[Doc Ruby]

I wish the US pharmacos had this AIDS vaccine to offer Africa and the rest of the world, instead of China beating "us" to it. Instead they're happier with the half $TRILLION Medicare giveaway, expensive AIDS cocktail "treatments", and ongoing business development^W^Wepidemics.

Profit!

[BlindFate]

1. Get Aids 2. Cure Aids 3. PROFIT

The cure works, the patient died.

[Paolone]

I used to works as IT support for a radiotheraphy group that developed particle accelerators "mods" for cancer treatment.
It turns out that the cure worked, it got rid of the optical nerve cancer that was killing the patient. Too bad the patient was had diabetes and died 1 week later. She was 80 as well.

So it could perfevtly be that the 50th patient died of something else, like car accident, work accident, etc etc.

49 people + 180 days = Ka-CHING!!

[Anonymous Coward]

"Keep in mind, that a lot of the recalled drugs, such as the COX2 inhibitors like Vioxx, don't show negative side effects until your trial goes into hundreds or thousands of subjects. And even then, the drugs are continually monitored after their release to look for effects that might be present only in 0.1% even or 0.001% of the population"

Guess that explains why drugs cost so much. Good thing no one's cheapening out by counterfeiting.

Statistics...

[moosehooey]

They probly decided they needed a certian level of certianty, say 95%, plugged the numbers into the statistics equations, and came up with n=49.

There are hundreds of Phase I trials going on

[Anonymous Coward]

Even the article says: " The ongoing tests in China include 29 in phase I, four in phase I and II, three in phase II and one in phase III."

So there are hundreds of Phase I trials going on right now around the world. It means very little. Phase I just shows that the vaccine is safe enough to be used in humans fora Phase II trial.

There have been Phase I AIDS vaccines for many years now. A few have made it to Phase III, where they test for efficacy, and none have been shown to be effective, which is why we're still trying new ones in Phase I.

I'm all in favor of these trials but a vaccine going into Phase I is not news. It is something that happens once a month or more often. Phase I is the easy part.

Why does the truth of of hiv-- aids matter?

[TheSunborn]

I come to think of something. Why does it actuelly matter if hiv causes aids?

It is a fact that most people who get hiv, and are not treated for it, will be dead within 10 years, so why does the exact cause of death matter?

Why? When a cure is already available

[SIInudeity]

Garlic!

Re:Why? When a cure is already available

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't bring that up!

I am South African and that shit is embrassing.

Let's see if Bill Hicks was right....

[rilister]

"I dunno how much AIDS scares y'all, but I got a theory: the day they come out with a cure for AIDS, a guaranteed one-shot cure, on that day there's gonna be fucking in the streets, man."

should be fun.

(ps. I know this is a vaccine, not a cure, but it kinda amounts to the same thing)

Re:Let's see if Bill Hicks was right....

[evilviper]

that day there's gonna be fucking in the streets, man.

Still no vaccine for getting run-over by a 2 ton car.

Dr. Dino calling on line k00k

[Anonymous Coward]

And after visiting virusmyth.net, please considere drdino.com and creationscience.com for all your science needs!!

All this 'measure HIV virus load, develop and die in AIDS' is as credible as the tooth-fairy!!!! No evolution, no HIV!!

Hats off to those brave test subjects

[Robotech_Master]

Imagine being willing to be shot up with a dead form of the AIDS virus. Which, for all you know, might well end up giving you AIDS.

For the equivalent of $250.

Damn.

Re:Hats off to those brave test subjects

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine being willing to be shot up with a dead form of the AIDS virus.

Which isn't what happened, but, hey, don't let facts confuse you.

C'mon, mods... Insightful?

Guinea pigs could not be infected

[krunk4ever]

So after reading the summary, I was wondering what types of healthy idiots were willing to test out a new vaccine by injecting themselves with the HIV virus. Who knows, if it doesn't work, do you get stuck with HIV the rest of your life.

However, upon reading the article, it states:

"The HIV-1 specific cells injected into the recipients were the DNA fragments of the virus which don't cause infection," he told Xinhua.

and that makes a lot more sense now.

Yes, but Manto Tshabalala-Msimang knows better!

[slashdotmsiriv]

"This is useless" would say-the Health Minister for South Africa, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang.

She has her own "very effective" approach against AIDS/HIV. She sais it is vital for people to build up their immune system so she strongly
believes in giving people the choice between antiretroviral drugs and taking traditional remedies, such as lemons,
garlic and beetroots. In fact she promotes mostly the second while her boss, never acknowledged that HIV is the cause of AIDS.

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/healthnews.php?new sid=50037

Brr.

[jesdynf]

Those Phase I testers have some major balls or testicular-equivalents.

"Yeah, okay, your tests came back, you're clean. So now we're gonna stab you and your friends with this needle full of some HIV we hacked up, and if any of you guys die we'll know we screwed up somewhere."

"Sounds good. Let's do that."

I don't know what it'd take to convince me to do that. Brr.

Christian

[rangek]

Are you seriously prepared to condemn every single infected person

Yes, he is. He is a Christian.

I don't think so. A real Christian would have pity, even for those who "made a mistake" or "were careless", and would not want them to suffer and die, leaving behind friends and family, who also suffer. Therefore, every Christain should support the search of an AIDS vaccine in an effort to reduce suffering. Therefore, the grandparent poster is not a Christian, or at least is quite far from understanding Christ's teachings fully.

garbled article

[m874t232]

The article is pretty garbled. But what they appear to be saying is that this was a DNA vaccine, that it generated an immune response, and that people didn't get sick from it. None of that is particularly surprising. In fact, just about every AIDS vaccine ever tested has generated an immune response and hasn't made people sick. The problem is whether it's effective against the real virus, and, so far, no AIDS vaccine has been, and chances are this one won't be either.

Mod Parent UP!!!

[grolschie]

Insightful! Not many people know about AZT causing AIDS symptoms. The weaker version (1/5th or less of the potency) marketed for animals has health warnings all over it. The potent human version is marketed for promoting health and well-being. Giving AZT to healthy people (even diagnosed "HIV positive" (should be classified as "HIV negative" actually - but that's another topic) but lacking any real symptoms) is a death sentence in itself.

Americans and Circumcision

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm glad to see that the Chinese are taking the lead in real HIV research. While Americans are out there trying to justify their own circumcisions and selling snake oil, the Chinese will develop a real vaccine and save millions of lives. Good for them.

Re:Americans and Circumcision

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. If trimming the labia could be shown to protect against HIV, would we be promoting that? Circumcision removes important tissue - many countries (most of Europe, China, UK) don't do it.

http://www.cirp.org/library/anatomy/cold-taylor/

Re:Americans and Circumcision

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, Americans are also working on things that inactivate the virus after it's already infected a person.

Google on "CSA-54"

Too bad..

[traveller604]

Too bad HIV is difficult to fight/cure because the disease mutates so fast.. HIV-1 immunity doesn't help much as it mutates in a matter of weeks to another :p

Re (ISC) explained

[DumbSwede]

Not really funny, but for those who don't know --
About 8 yuan Chinese currancy (also known as RMB) is 1 dollar.
Most probably got that though from context (call me pendantic).

Also (though I don't remember the exchange rate) in Hong Kong, they often refer to a Hong Kong Dollar as a "buck"

Did I mention my wife is a Chinese national?

My wife mentioned this news about 2 days ago. I was wondering when it would break in the West.

Don't trust info from China

[youguessedit]

I've lived here for more than three years now. It's hard to explain without sounding like a dick, but the threshold for what is an acceptable 'white lie' is a lot lower here than in other places. I'm not saying that everything you hear from a Chinese person is a lie, but you just need to be careful. They're not less honest than Westerners -- I lie all the time about stuff. But it's about stuff that it's you'll understand as culturally acceptable to lie about. Different culture, different idea about what's 'true'.

You know nothing about US-funded med research

[Xenophon Fenderson,]

The United States, via government agencies like NIH/NIAID or USAID, funds and performs extensive research on HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis in situ throughout Africa and Asia. When you get a free moment, take a look at CHAVI or NIAID, maybe do a few Google searches on the scientists' names. And all of these projects' participants, all the way down to admin staff and IT types like me, realize the current heavy burden of these three diseases on Africa and Asia (both socially and economically). I realize you have issues with large pharmaceutical companies, but please don't think that they are the only ones who do medical research here and abroad.

You Know Nothing, You Know No One

[Doc Ruby]

I don't think they're the only ones doing research. I do think that Chinese researchers have apparently beaten them to a vaccine. Even if this one is a limited success, it's still beating the American effort. An effort by the biggest, most educated and pampered medical industry in the world, rolling in profits from business as usual. Beaten by the Chinese, whose domestic endemic is not nearly their highest priority for investment.

FWIW, if I thought big pharmacos were "the only ones who do medical research here and abroad", I'd hardly be congratulating a Chinese team on their medical research.

I've tracked the HIV treatment science since I was working premed fulltime in a big NYC area hospital, in the pathology lab, working daily in the blood bank. I got squirted in the eye by a punctured hot bag of just-drawn blood, in 1987 as AIDS was in all the headlines and lunch conversations. I've studied molecular genetics, epidemiological genetics. I've been to Africa several times. I've had friends who got AIDS, and have helped care for strangers. So wind your IT staff experience up in a little pill and take it yourself to vaccinate you against making the kind of totally wrong speculation about my judgement you just broke out in.

I realize the pharmacos are paying your salary, but there's a reason they're not paying you to debate people who actually know how the global epidemic racket works.

Re:You Know Nothing, You Know No One

[Anonymous Coward]

This is just a Phase I trial - safety only. All it means is it doesn't make you sick on its own. I'm pretty sure it's not the first HIV vaccine trial to pass it either.

Getting it to actually prevent HIV infection in actual humans? Throughought the body, in the blood, lymph, and mucous membranes? Against a virus with an obscenely strong ability to evolve and mutate and that is present in countless variations in the population? That's a whole different ballgame.

Re:You Know Nothing, You Know No One

[Doc Ruby]

I don't know what makes you so sure there are other successes like this initial one. The WHO says

[Since 1987] more than 30 candidate vaccines have been tested in over 80 Phase I/II clinical trials, involving more than 10 000 healthy human volunteers. Two Phase III trials have been carried to completion and a third one is in progress.

In other words, only 2-3 have passed I/II to attempt III, possibly including the Chinese one we're discussing. So even just representing 33-50% of the successful initial tests is quite a triumph for a Chinese team without the funding and communications advantages of the others they mention. Which advantages will now be available to them. It really makes the US/multinational efforts look fat and ineffective.

mnb Re:First Phase of AIDS Vaccine Trials Successf

[Anonymous Coward]

No, HPV does. Not the same thing.

Testing Shark Suits

[Anonymous Coward]

The first thought that came to my mind was testing shark suits.

"I was watching one of those animal shows on the Discovery Channel. There was a guy inventing a shark bite suit. And there's only one way to test it. "All right, Jimmy, you got that shark suit on, it looks good... They want you to jump into this pool of sharks, and you tell us if it hurts when they bite you." "Well, all right, but hold my sign. I don't wanna lose it.""

Brings new meaning to " sign me up" dont it?

That time of the year again

[Aqua OS X]

Well, it's that time of the year again. We haven't had an AIDS cure post in a few months.

Lesbian doesn't mean no children

[phorm]

Just because you can't get pregnant through your normal sexual conduct doesn't mean you can't ever do so. There are Lesbian's who opt for fertilization through donated sperm, etc etc. In your case, however, my guess is that you have no such plans. Still, people do change their minds, so I guess that as recommended by others a letter of absolution or something along those lines might reduce your docs worries enough for him to prescribe the treatment. That, or finding a doctor who gets your situation a little better.

HIV partners

[phorm]

For those that are really willing to take the risk for on they love, I wonder if tests might eventually branch out into couples where one partner is infected and the other is "clean?"

Certainly there are a lot of other nasty viruses out there, and though an HIV vaccine would be a great boon to many people I wonder how much irresponsibility it would cause amongst others?

Testing window

[phorm]

Well, considering they recommend about 4 months after your last sexual act with a questionable partner before you can test "clean" and consider it safe (and sometimes a post test a few months later), I'd say it's about a 120-200 day window for signs that can be detected through blood testing.

I've never had any real cause to worry myself, but I have been tested as a just-in-case for the safety of myself and others.

I suppose not

[Xenophon Fenderson,]

I still think that's a rather skewed viewpoint of American/European research efforts, but you're right: I'm an IT guy, not a scientist. It is pretty sad that profit-driven research seems to give us yet another treatment for erectile disfunction. I'm glad that biomedical research isn't just the province of Big Pharma, and as much as I don't like how Bill Gates got his money, I really like this part of what he's doing with it.

first? first in china maybe..

[d723]

I'm a study patient in a Phase II trial of an HIV vaccine and I personally know of at least one other vaccine in Phase II. This web page seems to confirm that. The Merck Gag-Pol-Nef study started Phase II testing in January 2005 and has positive results. I thought I remembered my study doctor saying is was going to phase three, article on the current HIV vaccine landscape indicated two studies in Phase III. Phase III is where they get 800 people of high risk and give half the vaccine and half placebo and see if the vaccine group stays uninfected.

Either way, there have been quite a number of Phase I trials.

I also question this quote:

The recipients appeared immune to the HIV-1 virus 15 days after the injection,

How did they determine that? Certainly they didn't infect these people. I think this whole article is just some China-PR person's belch.

Oh I'm sorry, you got the placebo....

[voxel]

Arn't you susposed to always have a control group?

So...
"Yeah, you were a given a placebo instead of the real vaccine... Thats right, now you are HIV positive... sorry!, here is your $20 for participation, have a nice day".

Re:Oh I'm sorry, you got the placebo....

[d723]

They do have a control group and they most certainly do not test it by infecting people with a live virus. This article is full of shit, basically. Evidence of the fact that Slashdot is not in any way real journalism. Zero fact checking.

The article talks of a successful Phase I. It's not till Phase III that they get to test the actual effectiveness of the vaccine. In Phase III They get ~800 high-risk people and give half of them vaccine and half placebo and tell them to live their lives as if they didn't get the vaccine. Then they wait and watch to see if any of the vaccinated show signs of infection, and if so was there any significant difference from the control group.

And in my study it's more like $2500 dollars over the life of the 5-year study.

You also are never exposed to the HIV virus, unless you do it yourself. The standard disease vaccine that uses weakened forms of the virus has been tested and does not work for HIV. For the new vaccines they took a clue from the 2% of the human population that, although regularly exposed to the HIV virus, never develop symtoms. It turns out, these people have antibodies to some of the protiens on the inside of the HIV virus. The new vaccines take these protiens and insert them in a cold virus. The vaccine is a weakened form of this cold virus. The hope is that the immune system will react to this virus and develop antibodies to these protiens and then recognize them in the HIV virus if you get exposed.

So for it's showing promise. I was told that the white blood cells of those on my vaccine study that got the vaccine show a reaction to the HIV virus when exposed to it in the lab. Which is not proof of a vaccine but is something interesting. As far as I understand, one of the big problems with the vaccine I'm a study patient for is that it's 3 doses, which renders it fairly impractical to deal with the current situation in developing countries. I believe there's a Phase III study of it ongoing and they've started another Phase I & II study to see if it will work in 1 or 2 doses.

Caveat: I'm a patient, not a doctor, so I could have my shit messed up.

Thimerosal

[Mark_MF-WN]

Kind of a lame criticism. Thimerosal, for instance, is still a well-used and kick-ass anti-nauseant. You can't give it to pregnant women, but it's awesome for anyone else. It's particularly popular to help chemotherapy patients, who are often unable to keep meals down without powerful antinauseants of some kind.

Besides, women rarely, rarely pass on HIV. Even just vaccinating all men would all but annihilate HIV in just a few decades.

Easy

[wantedman]

Could someone with more insight please explain why there are scientists who deny there's a link?

There are many reasons, one is because a good scientist always questions theories. I mean, until someone goes, "Maybe the Earth revolves around the sun", we'll just grind away at a false theory, like the Arab Astrologers did in the middle ages with the geocentric model.

The second reason is because a room full of people can never agree on a single thing, that's why Government is done by majority, not by unanimous voting, because there will never be a perfect consensus. There will always be a group of people in this world who disagree with something.

Thirdly, money can corrupt, and someone can easily take a wrong stance to make some cash. Like Psychics that make money off of grieving people, "scientist" can sell some books on their false stances on controversial issues. It's sick, but it's capitalism and free speech. Like a website that claims that HIV becomes AIDS only when stimulated by having anal sex.(yes, that's on that website he linked to)

And lastly, our ideas about AIDS has changed. It's unfair to bring up a theory of AIDS in 1987, when our understanding of the disease was much different then today. A good theory about the atoms being composed of the Fire / Air / Earth / Water may have been a sound theory during the B.C., but it's not accepted now.

Chill

[Anonymous Coward]

Everybody relax, even if this vaccine works ... it would cost about 1-200 dollars a pill (or shot), a bit too much for the poor African people or any people in third world countries. Some of them have under 30 dollars a month salary. Also, it will probably be another 10 years or so until this gets approved.

Oh, wait

[Anonymous Coward]

Pregnancy == herpes?

Re:Oh, wait

[Anonymous Coward]

One is a sexually transmitted disease with a 100% mortality rate.

Blame it on the journalist

[Opportunist]

Seriously, I've seen my work being used in articles before, in both, computer security and statistics. Sometimes, you wish they wouldn't quote the source. Journalists are good at writing stories. They are bad at knowing anything about their subjects.

My guess would be that the Journalist in question has not the foggiest idea what DNA or RNA are, that his underlying press release did actually mention RNA and the journalist went "RNA? They mean DNA, that gotta be a typo."

Re:Blame it on the journalist

[Lurker2288]

There ARE DNA based vaccines where naked DNA is shot into your body (usually into a muscle) and your body's transcriptional/translation machinery makes the proteins, which the immune system then detects and responds to. Indeed, several vaccines currently in development rely on this technology. However, from the article, I can't tell exactly what they're doing: "The HIV-1 specific cells injected into the recipients were the DNA fragments of the virus which don't cause infection," doesn't mean a thing to me. If it works, obviously it would be phenomenal--but let's not forget that other vaccines have passed their phase I trials, only to be knocked out later.

Hold on, something's not connecting here

[Opportunist]

Ooookay. They immunized people and then shot them the virus? No, according to the article they exposed them to the non-infective parts of the virus.

At the same time, they claim that those people were protected from the virus. How do they know it if they only shot them with the parts that are unfit for transmitting the disease?

Re:Hold on, something's not connecting here

[milamber3]

Ok, I understand your point but you are missing something. They know a lot about the virus including what it needs to have inorder to infect someone. They can take out machinery that makes it deadly but still judge whether or not the real virus would still beable to infect someone who had the vaccination based on what happens to the non-deadly version.

For slashdot terms lets use an example that everyone should understand.

Lets say I have a computer virus that I want to test against my new patch. Now this virus is nasty and after it infects the computer it deletes your files. I don't want that to happen if my patch doesn't work during the test so I remove that delete command and replace it with a "Hello world!" output. Now, I run the program on a computer with no protection and "Hello world!" pops up, I install my patch and nothing happens. Now I have changed the end result but the machinery for the inital exploit into the computer is still there and I can say that I have stopped it.

That's the best way I can think to relate what they are doing. It's not perfect but biology and computers don't always match up perfectly.

Africa HIV estimates.

[I am Jack's username]

remember that about 50% of people in Africa have AIDS

Incorrect, the 2005 HIV estimate for Sub-Saharan Africa is 6.2%. The highest HIV rate in Africa is in Swaziland, with a 2005 estimate of 33.4% (high estimate of 45.3%).

North Africa and the middle east:
Adult (15-49) rate 2003: 0.2% ±0.1
Adult (15-49) rate 2005: 0.2% -0.1 +0.2

Sub-Saharan Africa:
Adult (15-49) rate 2003: 6.2% -0.7 +0.8
Adult (15-49) rate 2005: 6.1% ±0.7

The worst African country is Swaziland: Adult (15-49) rate 2003: 32.4% ±11.7
Adult (15-49) rate 2005: 33.4% -12.2 +11.9

Global:
Adult (15-49) rate 2003: 1.0% ±0.2
Adult (15-49) rate 2005: 1.0% -0.1 +0.2

Source: 2006 report on the global aids epidemic, Annex 2: HIV and AIDS estimates and data, 2005 and 2003 , UNAIDS, 2006-05. Accessed on 2006-08-21.

good news for sex tourism ..

[Anonymous Coward]

and slavors of women who force them to work as prostitutes .. actually, AIDS is not that bad thing.

Two words

[pedestrian crossing]

Tubal Ligation

Re:Two words

[Rocquestar]

Tubal Ligation Hell, slap them with a Tubal Litigation!!

Re:49 people + 180 days = proof?? 'Cosmic Scream'!

[callingalloldhippies]

Oh Hell Yes! Be sure and include the largest demographic in the US! The Elderly! We deserve it! and by the way, until till you hit 65 you are considered middle aged. Further more we have already endured 'pharmaceutical testing/military' via the us gov. in the 1960's when the S.F troops were administered LSD and the civilians of Nevada, Utah, Idaho etc. were invited to get up early and 'enjoy' the atomic testing, assured that as long as you did not look directly at the flash which could blind you...IT WAS PROVEN SAFE. ASK the guys who thought they could fly that chose high rise buildings in downtown San Francisco/L.A. for their solo flights or seeing Viet Nam replaying, right before their eyes ,in full audio and living color as they mowed down perfect strangers, in their hometowns months later. Labeled 'Nut Cases' (Physic Breaks) Then there are the Civilian workers out at JackAss Flats that typed away while the Military preformed their safe Underground tests of the Nukes. Those that are still alive call them self "DownWinders" Ask four generations of NV, Utah, Idaho, Mt. WY if they put any faith in a 50 person trial lasting 6 months is a reassuring warranty to them of proof of safety.

How about those mass murderers, thrill killers and especially the pedophiles that are useing up all those jail cells and tax dollars that could be used for all the vicious potheads, hookers and Ya! hackers.

Test that dangerous stuff on the old, tired, sick and worn out elderly population...there's plenty of them to go around. Besides it would be cruel and unusual punishment to make really, really not fit to live on this planet human beings say "Ouch"!

O.K. end of August Rant!

They were 49 from the beginning

[rbarreira]

Really, we're supposed to believe the study had exactly 49 participants? Not 50, or 150?

Surprisingly, you could have answered your own question easily if you had used google instead of rushing to post that. Note the date on the page I gave - "13 March 2005". From the page:

A total of 49 volunteers between 18 and 50 reportedly will receive the experimental vaccine.

Psoriasis

[Doctor O]

My whole family is plagued with more or less severe psoriasis, inherited by my grandfather's side. If yours is of the more severe kind (as I assume if you want to try anything new immediately), I suggest moving to the seaside as a start. This has improved the situation *very much* for all of us who are plagued with it. I am one of the happy ones who's not so severely affected, but even for my grandfather, the plaques pretty much disappeared. IIRC it has something to do with the saltiness of the air. In case you haven't yet, give it a try, and if only you spend a holiday there to see if it helps, two or three weeks should show a significant improvement already.

That's a pathological case.

[Grendel Drago]

You ever get an ingrown toenail? Not terribly frightening, right? I can show you pictures of ingrown toenails gone terribly, terribly wrong.

Not to say that genital sores aren't unpleasant, but what you find via google is likely to be a worst-case scenario. Medical journals have a whiff of "hey, Bob, you gotta see this!" to them, despite their scholarly diction.

Forest through the DAMN trees

[WhiteWolf666]

HIV is an STD, people. In most cases, HIV is transfered via sexual contact between either a man and a woman, or a man and a man.

One might even go as far to say that HIV is a Male Sexually Transmitted Disease. In fact, statistically, you can probably count the number of Woman to Woman HIV transmissions on your fingers and toes

Realistically, Female to Female transmission probably does occur on some level, but en gross, it is rare. If you solve Male to transmission, the primary means of infection are transfusion and needle sharing; and vaccinating most men would resolve this as well.

If Birth Defects are involved, there remain a couple questions:
A) Do birth defects result from the male side? (Rare, but a possible side effect; sperm deformation).
B) Can vaccinated individuals carry the virus? Are vaccinated individuals infectious?
C) Is the vaccine useful for wiping out existing infections? At what point during the HIV lifecycle will the vaccine still be effective? At what point during the HIV lifecycle will the vaccine still prevent transmission.

Given that it is an STD that is extremely difficult to transmit female to female, vaccinating all men will take a significant bite out of the problem without risking birth defects. This would immediately reduce HIV from a worldwide epidemic to a niche population disease (probably HIV positive gay women whom have multiple sexual partners), one which would be much easier to address via testing/standard prevention techniques, and would also be a much smaller probably area to focus medical resources on.

Mankind can afford HIV cocktails for .25% of the population. We cannot afford HIV cocktails for 25% of the population.

Oh really?

[Grendel Drago]

So, you're dancing on Isaac Asimov's grave now, then? Dick.

Don't waste your breath.

[Grendel Drago]

It's like arguing with creationists, or global warming deniers.

British Medical A. 70% Approved Drugs Don't Work

[cannuck]

Factoids:

Anyone believing the "spin" coming from the people dressed up in white lab coats and working for the Chemical/Medical Industrial Complex - well..... dream on. The British Medical Assoc. said last year that 70% of all APPROVED prescription drugs don't work.

There is not ONE scientific study done and published in a scientific scholarly journal with peer review that states : "HIV is the probable cause of AIDS".Its now 25 yrs. since "HIV>AIDS" notion was postulated and 60 billion dollars has gone into "HIV>AIDS" research. Not one electron micro scopic photo picture of the "HIV" (please no drawings - a real photo). Jonas Salk started to research/develop a polio vaccine in 1947- by 1954 the vaccine was done and tested - that's a 7 year time frame. 25 yrs.? - common - dream on.

The list of APPROVED vaccines that have proved fatal and/or caused life threatening outcomes or have permanently damaged children and adults is long - includes Autism. If anyone here thinks the motivation to develop an "HIV>AIDS" vaccine isn't all about money - dream on.

Sounds like you need to find yourself

[Slashdot Parent]

Sounds like you need to find yourself a lesbian dermitologist.

rare opportunity?

[sgt scrub]

Does this mean /.'ers that sign up for the next phase have a shot at having sex?

Re:49 people + 180 days = safe??

[An anonymous Frank]

I just don't see how a vaccine will "cure" all those "50%" that are now infected! A vaccine is used withni a prevention strategy, not as a cure. Also, when they claim that the virus was "safe", I'm not sure it means that it works "as a vaccine", but rather, that it did not cause the test subjets to become infected.

How is this a troll?

[drinkypoo]

You moderators are stupid. Stuuuuuuuuuupid. This is not a troll. A troll is where you say something you don't believe to piss someone off. Flamebait is any message you know will piss people off, but that you post anyway, and the moderators don't like. Learn the fucking difference.

This person obviously believes what they're saying, and so do I, which is why I can believe that they believe it. The simple fact is that doctors don't want to be involved with anything that might cause birth defects or sterility, and furthermore, you can not sign away your rights to sue, which costs money whether you win or not. (Attempting to sign away that right might cause you to lose the case, but is probably unlikely to get the case thrown out because the court would rather not be accused of trampling your rights either.)

Your signature, Batteries

[phorm]

$5 rebate on NiMH rechargeable batteries. [batteriesnimh.com]

Well, there's still one way (for women at least) to have constant, safe, enjoyable sex without worrying at such STD's :-)

Heard if from the Chinese yourself

[phorm]

Yes, my GF (who is Chinese) and other Chinese friends have actually told me not to trust Chinese in various matters - particularly involving money - because they will cheat you. On the other hand, I've found that for some things such as computer parts, the Chinese-run stores offered much better prices on items that often lasted longer than their expensive local-store counterparts, but of course there's a matter of feedback for that.

Oh, and if you want to see same real bargaining, take a Chinese female to a Chinese market and let her haggle the price of various items for you :-)

Stigma

[phorm]

After all - if it's lifestyle choices and not the virus, you'd have nothing to fear, right

Not that I'm part of the HIV-doesn't-cause-AIDS crowd, but I'd think the societal stigma of having the former would be enough reason to avoid infection, nevermind the premature and unpleasant death associated with it.

Vaccine lifetime

[phorm]

One might also want to take into account that many vaccines do have an effective lifetime. Many of them work by stimulating your body to produce antibodies etc against a particular virus. Your immune system acts like an army encampment that catches enemy scouts, and gets prepared for the possible invasion. Over time though, when no enemy shows up, your system may "stand down" stop producing the antibodies in sufficient number (and then you need a new shot of vaccine).

Having a working vaccine would be great and could definately improve the lives of some people (those with HIV+ partners, for example), as well as reduce the overall AIDS problem, but it would really really such if we find that out the hard way that after 7 years of use it no longer has an effective lifespan without a booster. Of course, the funny thing is that if it did work but have a limited effective term, those having relationships with HIV+ people would stay immune due to repeated exposure (your little army guys are staying on alert due to continued enemy presence).

There have been cases where people have been found to have a resistance to HIV/AIDS, and I do remember hearing of one where after being removed from exposure the ladies (who were prostitutes) in question were later infected years later after again exposing themselves to the virus, which would fit with the concept of their immuno-response lessening after exposure stops stimulating it. Of course it could just be that they were lucky to begin with, as having relations with an infected person does not 100% guarantee infection the first time.... but the risk thereof is enough that one wouldn't want to play the odds.

Yeah, because lesbians never have kids

[snowwrestler]

In fact some lesbian couples do choose to artificially get pregnant and bear a child. Your doctor has absolutely no way of knowing whether you will make that same decision in the future, and he is covering his ass. Many people (gay and straight) who choose to have children do not know they will at some point beforehand. I bet that if you had a tubal ligation he would not raise so many objections.

Sexual orientation has nothing to do with love and raising a family, which I believe is one of the points many of the advocacy groups are trying to get across to middle America.

Re:Yeah, because lesbians never have kids

[Dieppe]

Point is, being a leeeeeesbian she's not going to accidentally get pregnant. Being that she knows the prescribed drugs will cause birth defects, she's not likely to go out and get pregnant on purpose (artifical or natural insemenation) knowing that it'd mess up the kid.

Sometimes doctor's don't give their patients enough credit for taking care of their own health and well being. Sure, there are a lot of idiots out there, but needless to say "Okay I understand that this could cause birth defects. I'm not getting pregnant accidentally or otherwise. Give me the drug" should work fine for an intelligent woman knowing her health.

I don't think so

[snowwrestler]

An immuno-deficiency can be caused by lots of things.

Yes but the question is not any immune deficiency, but one particular disease.

Transplant patients take drugs to cause an Aquired Immuno-deficiency Syndrome.

Emphasis is mine. You are incorrectly applying the name of a defined disease to a sympton. The "Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome" is a specific disease that has as a symptom an immune deficiency. You are correct that other factors can cause the same symptom, but when referring to this specific disease, the presence of HIV is as much an indicator as the suppressed immune response--because a disease is whatever we define it to be.

By capitalizing at the end of that sentence, what you're doing is like saying "many things can cause a strep throat." Only one thing causes strep throat, but many can cause a sore throat.

Suggesting that AIDS (the symptoms, not the defective definition) can be caused by non-HIV is perfectly reasonable. Clearly HIV is a big cause. Chemotherapy would be another cause.

No, you are confusing diseases and symptoms, which are semantically distinct concepts in medicine even when they use the same words. Symptoms are directly observable but "diseases" are abstract concepts and so only exist as defined.

An immune deficiency (a symptom) can be acquired many ways, but the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (the disease) is by definition linked to HIV. That might be confusing to you but frankly that is your problem.

Intellectual Arrogance

[snowwrestler]

the intellectual arrogance here is overwhelming sometimes.

Science is the process of winnowing the not-true from the true. If we give greater credence to the resulting conclusions, does that make us arrogant? I suppose it does because we won't consider all points of view equally. Tough shit though, it's justified arrogance. If you don't believe in the results of the scientific method I invite you to think hard the next time you go to the doctor.

Learn more about how we know HIV causes AIDS

Science doesn't permit proving

[dunc78]

The rules of science don't allow one to prove, only to disprove. So you can offer an alternative hypothesis and have people try to disprove it or you can disprove the hypothesis that you are refuting.

Re:Science doesn't permit proving

[grolschie]

Ok then here's an alternative hypothesis (abeit a stupid one): "Aliens cause AIDS, not HIV". Disprove that!

What are these "rules of science" that you refer to? Heard about the concept of "burden of proof"?

Re:Vaccine lifetime/ HIV Test Uses Antibodies

[cannuck]

antibodies etc against a particular virus.

But the medical-chemical -industrial complex tells us that - if someone shows antibodies then the immune system isn't working and they have AIDS. Like you said - normally one should jump up and down if antibodies are present - which of course means that the immune system is working - is controlling the disease.

Re:mnb Re:First Phase of AIDS Vaccine Trials Succe

[whimmel]

Correct. How did he get modded to zero?

certain strains of human papilloma virus CAUSE cervical cancer. some cause genital warts. many are asymptomatic. You can be infected by more than one strain--even at the same time. The recent vaccine for this is expensive and only effective against the main cervical-cancer causing strains.

it also can cause types of penile and oral cancer. it may present as warts, or may not. Your body fights it off with time but you don't necessarily know whether you have it. Something like 50-75% of all who've had sex will get HPV at some point.

Let's review.

[Grendel Drago]

Yes, of course, the exception proves the rule. :rollseyes

Let's review. The original claim:

HIV is an INCURABLE disease, which kills %100 of it's victims.

The response (paraphrased):

It didn't kill this guy. Or this guy. If people with the disease die of old age first, the disease didn't kill them.

To break it down a little further, the original claim made was universal. A universal claim can be disproven by a single counterexample; e.g., if you claim that there's no such thing as a black sheep, I can present a black sheep as disproof of that claim. On the other hand, if you'd claimed that there are very few black sheep (or the grandparent poster had claimed that HIV kills nearly all of its victims), then I'd have a considerably tougher time disproving this weaker claim.

But as it stands, your attempt at eye-rolling fails it.