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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/
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.
Right, because no company ever makes vaccines for anything, ever. I can't imagine that anyone would want an HIV vaccine, so it must have no commercial value.
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.
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
Not quite.
Though the HIV virus mutates and copies tend to be unique to the person who carries the virus, there are still major hallmarks to the virus. Specifically, its protein structure. That one part of the virus has not changed in all these years. That's why the vaccines target the protein structure.
Cancer is an issue because it consists of cells growing rapidly and out of control, cells from your own body, thus they are cells made out of your own DNA. Your immune system does not fight cancer because your immune system would also have to attack all other, healthy cells in your own body. It has no way of telling the difference, because... essentially, there really isn't much difference. Cells that die within normal time versus cells that don't die when they're supposed to.
The problem with cancer treatment is that often involves cutting through and out parts of our own body, hard to detect from normal cells (especially brain cancer when tumours/cancer looks exactly like your own brain's healthy matter), radiation kills your immune system and there really isn't anything that you can do to stimulate the immune system to target cancerous cells for the reason I described in the previous paragraph.
Cure or significantly effective treatment for HIV, I expect to see even within my lifetime. Cancer? I'm afraid that aside from developing better methods of detection and pretty darn effective treatment options, cancer is going to be the last thing we're ever going to be able to cure with a shot or a pill. If ever.
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?
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!"
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.
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
Ya but only a small number of people in the U.S. need the treatment. Everyone is gonna need to get vaccinated though.
\.
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"...
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)
What you're ignoring is competition. There's more than one drug company out there, and they want to steal each other's profits. If Pharmex is selling the $100k/yr non-cure, PillCo will want a share of that market, and the way to get it is to sell something better. If PillCo sells the cure for a one-time price of $500k, that's still $500k they weren't getting before - it's in their interest to sell it. Financially, they're even ahead of their competitors for the first 5 years, and they can invest that money and use it to come up with something else to sell 5 years later.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
It's not paranoia when they really are out to get you.
I guess if you like hepatitis (incurable, destroys your liver, and often causes cancer), herpes (incurable), and numerous other nasty things... then yeah! Fuck away!
Cancer is an astrological sign, right? That makes it good. Liver is yucky anyway, even with onions.
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.
Mumble mumble making a vaccine for a polymorphic virus mumble - wish I hadn't bought that company's stock...
"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?)
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
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...
Nice troll. Insurance companies != pharmacos. Perhaps you could learn to read? No, that's asking too much. Besides, all companies, not *just* insurance companies but including them, pass costs on to the consumer. SO while insurance companies may be outwardly pursuing lower costs, in reality they don't care as long as they can pass the cost on.
http://xkcd.com/386/
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.
That is false. I think that you mean that the first cases detected were with gay's. The first cases were shown to come from Africa and traveled around via hetro sexuals. It was seen first in the gays, because of the liberal attitudes in bath houses of the 70's and our attitudes of gays back then (most were married).
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.
Sex is a helping aid to bring people closer together in a relationship, something sacred between two people, it becomes something more than satisfying base instincts.
\(^o^)/
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.
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!
I know. I was working at CDC at the time. By boss was asked to talk to reagan about funding this after he turned it down several times (he was the nation's top retro-virologist at the time). After having gone and met with reagan and was turned down, he came back and announced that he would have NOTHING to do with this. Why? because he said that his party had politicized it. My boss was the first person asked to take on this project, to which he turned it down immediately. Sad thing was that reagan was one of his heroes (being a Mormon bishop that was not surprising) until he met with him over this.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
... "unprotected sex". Yea. And rape. And being born to a mother with AIDS. Stupid kid. Shoulda been born in Sweden, not sub-Saharan Africa, which has 72% of the world's AIDs/HIV cases (HIV & AIDS Africa). It's hard for the light of compassion to shine through the cloak of prejudice.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
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.
No, you can test for HIV by PCR. If you have had the HepB vaccine, you will show crazy high antibodies on a HepB test, but that doesn't mean you have it. If you show positive for HIV by antibodies, they can then test your viral load directly.
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.
Dear AC, not even that is sufficient reason to wish someone suffering and death. Why would you care anyway, you are not involved.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
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.
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
the antibody test is just a cheap and easy method to actually rule out the majority of samples. Why bother putting the sample under a microscope when you can squirt it with some color changing juice to say "maybe" or "no".
You then throw away all the no's and actually look at the maybes.
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)
Apparently vows do break much more often than condoms.
I have read reports that the HIV virus and the HHV8 virus were inadvertently transmitted to the New York gay population during some vaccination trials for Hepatitis C, the vaccine in which was developed in Rhesus monkeys contamintated with both HIV and HHV8 viri.
The gay population in these locations were targeted in these trials due to their known promiscuity and exposure to Hep C. Thus AIDS and KS is primarily associated with gay populations. Note that AIDS and KS are two separate illnesses which became prevalent at a similar period and both now associated with gay men.
I think it is a tragedy, of which most people have never heard.
Sure:
Correcting my previous entry, it was allegedly a Hep B experiment, and the main peddler of this theory is Dr Alan Cantwell. I did a google check on his credibility and although the extremist media have latched onto the theory, there doens't appear to be much opposition to his work.
I'd be interested if anyone knows any commentary disputing his theory.
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:
Is the Pope Catholic?
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
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.
What do you think gay promiscuous sex and mental illnesses are caused by in some gays?
1) Is it from being homosexual (homosexual gene/upbringing makes you more horny)?
2)No females to reduce sexual urges?
3) Or is it condemnation from society disallowing normal gay relationships, and the only escape for them is to have sex with strangers, while acting straight to everyone else?
I was brought up in a Buddhist country with an atheistic family, the society and family had no problems with my sexuality when I came out in my early teens. Yet I seem to have a low incidence of promiscuity/interest in sex relative to the gay community and general population.
I know anomalies exist, but I see that many gays have had a difficult childhood due to non acceptance in schools and society in general. I'm sure that kind of upbringing would cultivate aversion to normal healthy homosexual relationships (due to internal embarrassment, being closed off from friends and family,etc). Anonymous sexual encounters have no negative effects on the reputation on the person, so it becomes more desirable. Perhaps this thinking persists even after the person has come out fully, like they say, old habits die hard.
I do not confess to know the reasons why homosexuals have more mental problems on average, but the issue is not just black and white. The moment you start to see a group of people as undisirable is the moment you see them as people who need to be eliminated or "fixed". This is what has caused imprisonment, concentration camps, and death penalties for gays in the recent past.
\(^o^)/
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?