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HIV Vaccine Ready For Clinical Trials
amigoro writes with the happy news that a possible vaccine against HIV is nearing readiness for clinical trials. The compound could provide a 'double whammy' by not only inoculating the patient against future infection, but destroying an HIV infection in progress. "The vaccine is an artificial virus-like particle whose outer casing consists of the TBI (T- and B cell epitopes containing immunogen) protein constructed by the researchers combined with the polyglucin protein. This protein contains nine components stimulating different cells of the immune system: both the ones that produce antibodies and the ones that devour the newcomer."
...not HIV but full blown aids?
So Skulldilocks threw acid on the schoolchildrens' faces, cause somebody from the bible told her to do it!
With the price of a year's treatment for AIDS in America approaching or exceeding $100k, I wonder how long it will be before this vaccine is 1. killed, 2. publicly smeared by pharmacos NOT producing it, or 3. price jacked to infinity. I hope it's none of the above, but....
http://xkcd.com/386/
If it's not addictive, and not something that infected person's have to take for the rest of their lives, I just don't think the drug companies will approve.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
How would you test this?
/headsmack D'oh! I was in the placebo group!
Screw AIDS patients and see if you get sick?
http://vrc.nih.gov/clintrials/clinstudies.htm These are ongoing safety trials at the National Institutes of Health.
actually, it is. its been 22.3 years.
So Skulldilocks threw acid on the schoolchildrens' faces, cause somebody from the bible told her to do it!
People are just making crass jokes and whining rather than actually recognising that this is a great step in the right direction for finding a cure/prevention for AIDs. I hope that all the cynicism about drug companies ensuring it never gets out is unfounded...
which is totally what she said
This isn't a cowpox vaccine -- it does not contain any living or dead viral material. Read the article, please. You won't get HIV or AIDS from a synthetic protein.
What virus? if what the article says is correct (and im understanding it properly), the vaccine is a "virus-like particle" which has the major HIV protein markers and coatings, that are common across all strains of HIV (but lacks any actual RNA to inject into cells). The marker's will hopefully trigger the immune system to build resistance. Now that thats out of the way, this sounds kinda fishy. It's one thing to come up with a vaccine, but it also claims to be a cure for HIV infections that have already taken place. As much as I wish that was true, it seems so improbable that the first 'cure' for a viral infection that we ever develope is not only vaccine, but also against what is possibly the deadliest virus lying around.
+1 Informative
If this type of treatment is both A) Approved and B) Works, this is a giant leap in medicines. It would seem that this same type of approach can be taken into other areas such as cancers. The big problem it seems here is alot of research was needed before they were able to get the proper protiens and desired parts of the HIV virus.
For something like cancer where this data is probably already around, if this HIV vaccine proves effective, it might only be a small matter of time before we see giant leaps in curing cancer and other things.
The big problem is going to come when other companies try to develop ontop of this research and run into patent problems. Its going to really hurt us if people cant take this methodology for treatment and apply it to other areas of medicine because of a silly patent.
http://interserver.net/
Anyone else rather skeptical of the origins of the article?
/. post!)
1. Google News isn't showing anything else on this (aside from this very
2. The claims it is making about the vaccine are astounding and are, unless you have a paid subscription to the single medical journal article referenced, unverifiable. Neither are there any quotes attributed to anyone.
3. The site in question is not even a hard news site; it appears to however be chock full of dressed up press releases by non-profits.
As promising as this "article" may read, there's no evidence that we should take these claims seriously.
The Fight for Student Power on Campus: www.forstudentpower.org.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The virus's life depends on getting around such a cure - it will evolve to evade the cure. In only takes one copy of the virus in one person out of millions to randomly have a resistant strain.
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
after the clinical trials are done.
We've seen these kinds of claims before (in HIV research, cold fusion, and many other areas).
Here the only source is "a group of Russian researchers." How about some peer review before we get all excited?
Wow, that's so inspiring and insightful. I bet you hope to get modded up for your great post. What if you dont? Are you then doomed to be insignificant bogaboga on Slashdot that no-one knows about? What if your plan fails to work? Karma whoring is not a joke, bogaboga!
I wonder if this has been tested enough to see if the virus evolves past it
Slashdot: Curing AIDS once a month since 1997.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Hate to be a skeptic, but wake me when they publish in a journal that can be peer reviewed by the English-speaking world. Doklady Biochemistry and Biophysics? My subscription must have lapsed.
An HIV vaccine would, depending on price and risks, most likely be distributed to those who do not yet have the disease but may be at high risk. Since some of the highest risk patients (people who engage in unprotected sex and IV drug users) are less likely to go tell their doc they need it, let's hope it gets cheap and safe enough to make it a mandatory childhood shot!
My other sig is funny.
Tell that crap to a medical worker who got aids from an accidental needle prick or the woman who got it from her husband. Sanctimonious SOB.
An infinite number of reused 640k and Balmer Chair jokes to bore everyone to death in one instant. Awesome.
You've explained why yourself.
Once the immune system can recognise the HIV markers, it will kill any HIV infected cells which match those markers. That means it will kill existing infections as well as any new virions entering the body.
The key claim is that the eighty proteins matching HIV's structure are unique enough that the virus won't be able to evolve resistance. The only other problem might be that this vaccine will be too complex to be mass produced.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Doklady Biochemistry and Biophysics is a bimonthly journal containing English translations of current Russian research from the biochemistry section of the Doklady Akademii Nauk (Proceedings of the Russian Academy of Sciences). The Proceedings appear 36 times per year; articles from the biochemistry section are collected, translated, and published in 6 issues per year. Doklady Biochemistry and Biophysics publishes the most significant new research in biochemistry being done in Russia today, ensuring its scientific priority. Doklady Biochemistry & Biophysics
Can I drink my vaccine?
As a homosexual, I must say this is great news! I really hate condoms, and this new vaccine will eliminate the need for them! We can go back to the glory days of the 70s, when you could just have sex with anyone you wanted to, with no consequences.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
US has one of the most restrictive laws in the world in relation with Pharmaceutical patents. The Pharmaceutical Industry (PI) get the patents for so long that you have to pay great amounts of money because there are no generic alternatives. The governement authorizes abusive practices.
In fact WTO tries to impose protections for the pharmaceuticals in "third world" countries. Any time US negotiate a new commerce treaty with any "third world" they impose those conditions.
But has been some changes, in Africa some drugs can be declared a "priority" for the Health System so the Lab HAS to give the patent to the gobernement so he can produce a low price drug to be distributed.
Another Thing is that de PI dont make trials in US, they do it on other countries and when the drug is safe to be sold, they come to the FDA in the US and the ask for permision. Of course those "other countries" are South America or Africa and of course not always the drugs are safe to be sold but the PI can pay very well to the FDA guys.
Being gay doesn't increase your chances of AIDS... And there are still other STDs, so your out of luck for bringing back the "glory days"...
Sweet, with a cure right around the corner I can sleep easier at night after bangin hos from the PJs.
IMMUNOGEN! Why didn't we think of it sooner!
This data can be true, but you have to consider why this is true.
Thanks God im not Northamerican, LOL, so i can tell you from another perspective.
Another fact is that less educated people got more Venereal Disease and the lower incomme are the less educated.
Nowadays, US has a great problem of Unemployment and a poor education quality. So maybe if you see those facts you can understand why Afroamercian and Latinamerican people are the most afected by AIDS.
According to Wikipedia, there are 17 candidates in phase I trials, four in phase I/II, and one in phase III.
That same article mentions that there is a great degree of diversity in HIV, meaning one HIV vaccine won't protect against all strains.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
It's not paranoia when they really are out to get you.
Troll? I guess the puritans got mod points today...
Great Intellect...
As someone who has actually worked on an HIV vaccine (a plasmid-based DNA vaccine), I have to caution that the field is a graveyard of failed attempts, ranging from traditional vaccine methods a century old, to exotic cutting-edge variants. There is considerable skepticism that an HIV vaccine (even given a very elastic definition of "vaccine") is even possible, in part based on the apparently complete absence of any "natural" sterilizing immunity. At best, there exists a small population of non-progressors who are able to hold the virus at stalemate due to genetic variations in certain receptors, a mechanism that seems unhelpful as far as vaccines goes (although relevant to drugs, specifically entry-inhibitors).
While VLPs (virus-like particles) are certainly a promising vaccine technology (the cervical cancer vaccine that's been in the news recently is VLP-based), I really am pessimistic that it is the solution to the substantial problems that any working HIV vaccine would have to overcome. At this point, I don't think anything will work short of somehow granting a patient's immune system innate resistance to HIV through some kind of gene therapy approach (there actually are people working on this sort of approach, but gene therapy as a whole has a long way to go).
AIDS and HIV were once considered separate. The definition of AIDS was modified to require HIV.
That sucks. What about all the people with Aquired Immunodeficiency Syndromes from other causes? There are chemicals that can do it, and many other causes as well. Now that the definition of AIDS has been modified, do these people no longer have Aquired Immonodeficiency Syndromes? They're all healthy and OK now?
Furthermore, if that's all AIDS means anymore, why do we even need the term? For other infections, we don't have a separate name. If you are infected with tuberculosis and then start coughing, we don't change the description to Aquired Coughing Syndrome (ACS).
What about the people who got it from tainted blood transfusions, or their parents, or something equally not their fault?
Yeah, I realize that you're a cone, but there's enough cones in this comment tree that it needs to be said.
(rot13) rpbzbab@tznvy.pbz
In reality yeah, good yet another potentional vaccine is going to enter clinical trials. I reality very few drugs make it past phase one trials, even fewer past stage two, and less after phase 3. Going into stage one while a significant step in the right direction means very little as so many factors can weed it out as a viable drug along the way. Thats why the drug companys charge so much. For every 10000 they try they find one that works. When it gets to phase 3 then its something to be truely watched.
--- Always remember. 99.36% of all statistics are inaccurate.
OK, lemme get this straight:
1) The HIV tests look for *antibodies* to HIV.
2) And since vaccines are designed to stimulate antibody production,
3) Wouldn't this vaccine make you test positive?
Mumble mumble making a vaccine for a polymorphic virus mumble - wish I hadn't bought that company's stock...
AIDS in America approaching or exceeding $100k, I wonder how long it will be before this vaccine is 1. killed, 2. publicly smeared by pharmacos NOT producing it, or 3. price jacked to infinity
Wait, I thought the evillll insurance companies were all about paying out less money. So wouldn't they want this?
OMG My dailykos head assplode!
"Double whammy", of course, being a professional immunological term.
Don't put advice in your sig.
MOD PARENT UP!!! Insightful.
The health insurance companies. Since no matter how hard they try, they can't always dodge the bill for all those drugs, they win if the vaccine works and is approved.
Are you adequate?
How are you going to do human clinical trials with a vaccine? Infect people who sign up and see if it works?
That HIV causes AIDS is established about as well as that the influenza virus causes the flu.
If you're reading Wikipedia, might I suggest the article on Koch's postulates instead?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Culón,
I thought your mother would tell you what I told her was I was pounding her ass last night (I was right before Rocco). The CIA has been infecting third world nations with all manner of diseases for over 50 years. That's why you'll always be 3rd world.
I would gladly take the US' poor education (including the relatives here) over the desalfabetizados in your country... What's that Microsoft, Pfizer, IBM, Oracle, et al are draining your country's wealth and natural resources faster than any Spanish Armada ever could.
Tell that crap to a medical worker who got aids from an accidental needle prick ...
Or, indeed, to someone who got AIDS from having some fun and sleeping around. WTF is wrong with that?
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
WRONG ASSHOLE
If it works and it was truly an artificial virus then you could have the third whammy in the side effect that it would be distributed through unsafe sex and sharing of needles.
:P
Talk about an effective delivery system. HIV would be wiped out quicker than it got started (pretty dang quick)!
But then I guess it would be hard to make money off of it. It really stinks how our society is driven by greed. Maybe I would change my mind on this if I was Oprah rich. Everyone PayPal me $5 towards making this happen
Nick Powers
Encryption: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to encrypt it...
...that this is (1) a phage (2) developed by one of the more wellknown biowarfare centres?
Indeed. This strikes incredibly close to home, actually. My mother is currently a nurse. Once while drawing blood from a lady, the lady went psycho and blood ended up spraying into my mother's eye. Why were they drawing blood? She had common symptoms of AIDs. Those next few days were hell for the entire family (First, the lady refused to give blood again for testing, and second the labs still process it at the normal rate, despite the fact it happened on the job), thankfully it turned out said crazy lazy did NOT have AIDs or HIV. Could you fairly have cursed a faithful wife and mother to AIDs through such a silly claim? Furthermore, what's wrong with sleeping around, anyway? I shouldn't just have to defend it with my own mother...
I can't speak about the specifics of this vaccine, but one of my initial concerns would be that it would destroy the usefulness of the antibody-based HIV test--the one that is most commonly used to screen for HIV.
This has been one of the controversies with tuberculosis for quite awhile (where antibody-based tests are also the most efficient), where being vaccinated with a partially effective vaccine you essentially destroy the ability to easily see if you are infected or not (I believe more sensitive tests, like PCR-based tests, are required).
If this is going to be another TB vaccine, you can leave me out. I'd rather know easily if I had HIV.
I wonder if the current regression to medieval culture has progressed enough that this vaccine will be banned because it promotes promiscuous sex?
A vacine works by stimulating our system against a disease before it hits us. The problem is that most bugs do their damage before our immune system can do its job. In this case, they picked constant proteins for a reason. They are in hopes that HIV needs these to survive. We as humans can lose our arms and legs and still be considered human. But what happen if we lose our brains? Are we still human? Considering that our very definition of death is now based on brain death, says that is what makes us human.
The real problem here is the idea of a cure, or a true vaccine. I do not believe that this will work. The reason is that when the virus is coated in IgG, it is then "swallowed" by macrophage. The phage's job is to destroy the virus, but it currently releases the very RNA from the coating, which if it should leak beyond the globule, it can then infect the macrophage. That is exactly how HIV works. This does NOTHING to stop that. For a small exposure, this may work. But if you have a large exposure (which is what seaman hanging around does), then your chance will increase.
Now with all this said, my degree is from early 80's, and my core knowledge of this was from when I worked at CDC (81) in the beginning of all this . So, I am not current on this. Hopefully, I am wrong.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Surely you have to be HIV negative before trying to prevent infection with a vaccine.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Just a question, what do you think AIDS means? AIDS is not plural of AID, and thus calling it AIDs is wrong. AIDS expands to Acquired Immuno-Deficiency Syndrome, so either capitalize every letter or capitalize nothing.
There is a difference. A lot of people see sleeping around as a bad thing that a person is doing deliberately: an immoral act of will. Very few people see an accidental needle prick, or a bad blood transfusion, or being born to someone HIV positive, as a bad thing that a person is doing deliberately.
Neither act deserves HIV, of course. Well, with the possible exception of people who are careless with other people's hearts... and almost none even among them. Unless they're also child molesting neo... oh, er... that wouldn't be good for the kids, since you don't want the molesters to have HIV. Maybe we hit them with baseball bats?
but there's everything wrong with doing so irresponsibly. HIV isn't the only STD out there, after all.
If you're one of those people who 'sleep around', do so cleanly, do so safely, keep track of who you sleep with, get tested regularly; and if you do get tested positive for any STD, tell those who you slept with since the previous test (+ some time, due to incubation times) to get tested as well, as it is likely that 1. you got it from one of them* and 2. you gave it to some of them.
If you can't bring yourself to act responsibly, then I'm sorry - I can't bring up much sympathy for you when you do get an STD.
* assuming you didn't get the STD through blood contact/kissing**
** yes, the virus involved with a cold sore ( herpes labialis / HSV-1 ) will happily live in those other mucous warm areas, albeit extremely rare for it to travel southward. Similarly, genital herpes ( herpes genitalis / HSV-2 ) will happily nestle in the mouth.
Your mother wasn't offered PEP? I thought that was standard practice now for anyone coming into possible contact with HIV, since if taken with 72 hours offers an 80% reduction in the chance of contracting the disease. Also to reliably find out the crazy lady's HIV status reliably would have taken around a month after the last known possible infection. There are tests that give results in around a week - but they are known to have a much higher risk of false positive/negative.
The reality is that clinical trails are being done in the USA, also for treatments for HIV. For many diseases, the USA both has a large population of patients who have exhausted every existing treatment option, and a large population of patients who cannot afford existing treatments. That makes it a good recruiting ground for clinical studies. The disadvantage is the high cost of the trials.
(I have heard rumors of at least one incident in which FDA officials suggested that before trials in the USA could be permitted, a new treatment should be tested on foreigners first --- I assume that that is not official policy.)
Clinical trials in 'third world' countries are a booming industry in places like India, which possess sufficient numbers of trained health professionals, but also have a lot of patients who cannot afford normal treatment options, and where cost of trials is substantially lower than in the USA or Europe. The technical procedures still have to meet the same standards as if the trials would have been done in the USA, that is not the problem. The real problem is explaining to often very poorly educated people who are in bad straits, that they are participating in the evaluation of experimental drugs -- the principle of "informed consent" tends to be a bit illusionary in such cases. That indeed makes such trials controversial.
Payments by the pharmaceutical industry to the FDA are something that Congress, in its wisdom, has institutionalized. The logic behind this must have been that almost anything is better than raising taxes, although in this case the almost seems highly questionable. It is quite possible that the objectivity if the FDA is not in the least affected by this, but the appearance of propriety also counts for something.
As for the cost of drugs in the USA, keep in mind that the simple economic law of demand and supply applies in the pharmaceutical world as well. The industry develops treatments that are very expensive to administer, such as for example some cancer treatments, because there are a sufficient number of patients who can (directly or indirectly) afford them. There are still many more diseases than treatments, so the industry opts to develop cures for those diseases that are financially interesting. If the patients could or would not pay, then the development of a cure would make no economic sense. A $200k treatment for the cancer of an American is financially viable; a $200 treatment for the life-threatening parasitic infection of a patient in sub-Saharan Africa is not.
There are limits to the wisdom and efficiency of the free market.
While it's always good to have another candidate, there are several vaccines that have already been in trials for years. The most promising one currently is an adenovirus-vector trivalent vaccine from Merck which is in Phase II trials now. Details may be found here.
if they are "giving it away", then it must be an experimental drug. Hasn't your mom taught you that nothing is free (at least not in America).
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
We have poured so much money into something that people 95% of the time get by doing stupid stuff. Meanwhile, people are still dying from cancer. Way more people. Granted, sometimes the cancer is caused by stupid stuff, but it's just about as likely to strike you even if you are fit and healthy. HIV can't claim that except by a bad blood transfusion. Mostly it's from morons trading needles and having unprotected sex - sorry it's pretty hard for me to churn up any sympathy much less justify the amount of money that's been spent trying to cure it.
So please - cure it so we can turn our attention to more important diseases.
It's not too difficult to grasp and can help people put GM issues into perspective.
It intuitively explains to me why, for example, such a large proportion of cloning attempts fail...
You ever tought about Ghonnoroe, Syphilis, HPV, Chlamydia, Hepatitis etc.. ?
...
Loose the condoms and it'll sure get -lots- easier on you to get those ones in your system;
some are quite lethal after some time! So don't loose the rubber puppets too fast or get burned
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
...unless the needle wasn't sterilized properly. But it would cure it anyway.
lol: You see no door there!
Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970)
You have to look at religions from an evolutionary standpoint. There were lots of religions over the years yet today there are only a handful that dominate the world. Why is that? There has always been nature and before the scientific revolution came along people were still subject to natures laws. Diseases existed way before people understood them. So the belief systems (religions) that gave the best advice on how to live survived and prospered. Since most of the surviving religions frown on sleeping around there must be a benefit even if the religions reason is morality. And that real benefit is disease. If you have a population that is completely monogomous (marriage isn't important just an institutionalized form of monogomy) then you will have much less disease then a gang bang society (I may copyright that).
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Must be a slow news day -
Exactly how many dozens of times has an aids vaccine neared clinical trials?
When one of them makes it through the trials and proves to be worthwhile well then that will be news. Till then its just noise.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
Try reading this:
http://www.virusmyth.com/aids/data/abnvp.htm
The number of idiots on here - makes me sick. You act as if you know ANYTHING at all about 'HIV' and 'AIDS', and then merely parrot whatever bullshit Big Pharma and their so-called 'researchers' have told you for the past twenty years.
Vaccination doesn't exist. It is a fraud. Read Dr.Hadwen's talks about it, just Google it.
According to the CDC, at least 40% of the people who are allegedly 'infected' with 'HIV' in the U.S. DON'T KNOW IT. That would be 400,000 people. Yet they aren't dropping like flies. Sexually transmitted diseases (i.e. REAL STDs) are at an all time high, so how come hundreds of thousands of heterosexuals aren't dying every YEAR in the West?
Why are so-called 'AIDS' mortality statistics always given CUMULATIVELY?
This is unbelievable!
Imagine we did this with, for example, herpes cases.
These are made up figures, but you'll see what I mean by CUMULATIVE:
Firstly - the NORMAL way of presenting disease figures:
1990: 10
1991: 14
1992: 11
1993: 5
1994: 1
Now, the 'AIDS' way of presenting the SAME figures - CUMULATIVELY.
1990: 10
1991: 24
1992: 35
1993: 40
1994: 41
Now, I wonder why on earth they would do that? It couldn't possibly be, could it, that they are trying to SCARE you into thinking 'AIDS' is killing more and more people every year, even though it ISN'T?
It's all about FUNDING and JOBS for moronic 'researchers' who are happily riding the 'AIDS' bullshit gravy train, while REAL diseases (including all the so-called 'AIDS indicator diseases') are LOSING out in the funding battle.
Try reading Virusmyth before pretending you know sod all about the issue, idiots.
mod parent up
You have gay sex with your dad and get AIDS. Shouldn't have been doing it, but you probably already did. Capiche?
Sleeping around spreads disease with AID being probably the deadliest. It's a damn shame that people like your mother could be exposed to the disease through no fault of their own, but when some people engage in behavior that's likely to spread AIDS, the risks to health care workers/hemophiliacs/pretty women increase as well. That's the funny thing about infectious diseases; it's not just your own life you have in your hands.
The parent said, "America isn't the world. With HIV being such a high profile disease, there is no way an effective vaccine will be slowed or stopped by politics and bullshit." I value the idealism behind this remark, but it just isn't true.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotavirus#Vaccines
Rotavirus kills millions of people, particularly children, worldwide. An effective vaccine called Rotashield was pulled from the market because a few people - less than 5, I believe - experienced intussusception. A vaccine that isn't considered safe in America will not see the light of day elsewhere in the world. Unfortunately, effective vaccines can and will be slowed or stopped by politics and bullshit. Similarly, this HIV vaccine still has a long road ahead to become approved for widespread use.
This is a TRICK POST.
Now that the definition of AIDS has been modified, do these people no longer have Aquired Immonodeficiency Syndromes? They're all healthy and OK now?
I think you have some basic misunderstandings about how language works and evolves. The term AIDS was coined around 1981-1982 to refer to a newly emerging disease we now know is caused by HIV. There may have been a some confusion about other causes of a compromised immune system that got thrown into the mix of the AIDS crisis in the early 80s, but it was really a misnomer and never really widely associated with the term AIDS.
Furthermore, if that's all AIDS means anymore, why do we even need the term?
Because that's the word people use to refer to a compromised immune system due to HIV. You seem to think that word usage follows from the most logical definition. That's simply innacurate. Word definitions are a common agreement among the users of a language. AIDS is no longer a "syndrome", but since 99.9% of the population uses that term, it's stuck. No amount of shouting "but it's not perfectly accurate!!" will change that.
AccountKiller
Social Darwinism much?
IAALS.
There's some good arguments to support your claim - yet I doubt it.
Pro: The classic argument for survival of the fittest religion is Circumcision for the early Hebrews. Other area religions sacrificed their first born sons to the various Bels (Baals in the OT spelling) and Tiamat types. The Jews made it a symbolic sacrifice, their populations grew faster, and they won a series of wars by it, or so the argument goes.
Con: A sexually transmitted disease is a half-assed infectious disease that can't spread by any better means. Sex will transmit even very sensitive germs, easily destroyed by a few seconds exposure to the rest of the environment. Germs that will die from a little cool air or a few seconds exposure to solar UV will manage to pass through intercourse. The real professional infectious diseases have developed methods such as surviving long term in dirty drinking water, exploiting fast multiplying insect species as intermediate hosts, or even the aerosol spread of some plagues, that make them literally billions of times more efficient than STDs at surviving and multiplying. So if a religion tended to survive by discouraging the spread of STDs, One could have done a lot better by discouraging the spread of other diseases.
"Cleanliness is next to Godliness" would have really caught on. The movement by the dark ages Europeans to reduce bathing (supposedly started to conserve increasingly scarce firewood) would have faltered quickly and not lasted for over 500 years. Similarly, bad beliefs, such as believing that black cats are unlucky and so hunting down animals that slowed the spread of plagues by killing rats, would have died off swiftly as people who believed otherwise tended to survive. If the selection pressure from the black plague and a dozen other major epidemics wasn't enough to make the old black cat superstition die out, then the selection pressure from STDs would just about have to be pretty minimal.
Who is John Cabal?
Many people with tuberculosis do not cough.
So, would you say we need a separate term for people with tuberculosis who are also coughing?
If not, why not? Why does HIV infection get two names, while tuberculosis infection only gets one?
(the obsolete tuberculosis names were purely alternatives, not different names for different stages of the disease -- like the GRID/AIDS situation or the HIV/LAV situation, not the HIV/AIDS situation)
Furthermore, what's wrong with sleeping around, anyway? I shouldn't just have to defend it with my own mother...
What's her number? I'll defend sleeping around with your mother ;-)
Is it useful to distinguish sore throat caused by strep from sore throat caused by the flu?
Uhm..., yeah. Is this a rhetorical question? Strep is a bacterial infection while flu is viral. Antibiotics have no effect on a virus, so the information is quite pertinent when deciding how to treat your sore throat.
http://www.altheal.org/toxicity/orphans.htm
And all because the majority of people are braindead SHEEP like all the 'HIV causes AIDS because the TV told me so' assholes here...
Apparently vows do break much more often than condoms.
Odd, that sounds EXACTLY like an episode of House. Except it wasn't AIDS, it was a disease that made you go crazy. And Forman had it.
mod parent up
Funny how Britain, that has seriously resisted the introduction of GM crops, does not have honey bee colony collapse(s) - innit?
4 02 As Bush just VETOEWD a ban on Thimerosal for kids ... apparently they're all left behind.
Must be co-incidental then?
Just a statistical 'glitch' or 'quirk' - uh huh.
Well - if history is anything to go by - just wait until they discover or accidentally create a brand new and improved, super resistant, hyper-immune agent that is rapid acting on the old immuno system.
And - hey - the Nobel Prize for 'discovering' the "Newest Variant AIDS (strains P,Q,R & S)" like - say - MRSA and new variant TB!
Ah ha! We're all safe, because it's only carried by extinct honey bees.
Whilst we are at it, if a few a million hits of autism keeps the proles in their place - who needs ovens? http://www.bmj.com/cgi/eletters/330/7483/112-d#93
Ah ha! The downside of progress, is the upside of big pharma shares?
RR
TROLL CREDO: "I don't care how you mod me, just as long as you do."
Duesberg, P., Koehnlein, C., and Rasnick, D. (2003). The chemical bases of the various AIDS epidemics: recreational drugs, anti-viral chemotherapy and malnutrition. Journal of Biosciences 28(4), 383-412.
The abstract:
So many comments have been posted that enthusiastically denigrate people who have sex. In summary, stating that people who do not practice abstinence and have contracted HIV somehow deserve it. By this silly, childish reasoning, anyone who drives a car on a regular basis and gets into a fatal accident likewise “deserves it” because they know driving a car comes with inherent risk.
Sex is not bad and it is hardly immoral when safely practiced between two consenting partners. I hope all of you will take notice that every one of us are equipped with organs and instincts that have developed specifically for the purpose of engaging sexual practices. No one would disparage anyone else for using their eyes to see. Why do so towards people who use their genitals for their proper purpose? Perhaps it upsets certain groups that people who enjoy sex are just that much more likely to propagate their genes than those who consider sex an abomination.
What we need are more people who are properly informed about sex so that it can be had as a rational pleasure. This completely baseless and subjective assumption that we must abhor the practice needs to go away. Supporters of anti-sex messages need to prove it or keep their opinions to themselves if they only want to tear down others.
At any rate, I would rather see more people fucking than fighting.
Why bother.
Enjoy getting argyria from your over-priced placebo.
If this occurs and works as planned, hippies and free love will return. This does not bode well for the war on terror ... errr freedom.
Then again I guess they still have other STDs to worry about.
since the test of the crazy lady took more than 20 minutes im guessing this was a few years ago. There is a fairly accurate test that can be performed very quickly these days.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
The shots they give people who are exposed to rabies are not vaccines. Vaccines are antigens you give someone so that they will produce antibodies. In rabies, you're actually injecting antibodies purified from an animal that has been immunized against rabies.
The quick tests still require an incubation period to test for early signs of the infection. A test taken the day after infection would almost certainly come back with a false negative. The best tests I've seen can obtain a reasonably accurate detection a week after the initial infection. Unfortunately by then its too late to do anything. I'd advise anyone who might be at risk of HIV infection to read up on PEP. It's often kept in supply at hospitals for accidental needle pricks. http://www.pep.chapsonline.org.uk/
I don't remember the last time a /. conversation pissed me off this much. I can't believe some of you people. However, in a direct reply to your overly aggressive and grossly misinformed post:
Yes, you can get HIV from needlesticks . This article clearly states that in the UK alone at least 5 confirmed infections from needlesticks have occurred. Of course that's not a huge number, but it clearly happens.
Similarly, this is but one article identifying some women who have gotten HIV from their husbands. I'm think you are the one who should be reading up before making an ass of yourself. I found both of these references with a quick Google search. I'm sure you could have managed the same, and I'm sure there are plenty more out there.
Oh, and let's not forget mother-child infection. I suppose you believe those newborns deserve to die as well, yes?