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German Doctor Cures an HIV Patient With a Bone Marrow Transplant
reporter writes "HIV is the virus that causes Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). Until now, HIV has no cure and has led to the deaths of over 25 million people. However, a possible cure has appeared. Dr. Gero Hutter, a brilliant physician in Germany, replaced the bone marrow of an HIV patient with the bone marrow of a donor who has natural immunity to HIV. The new bone marrow in the patient then produced immune-system cells that are immune to HIV. Being unable to hijack any immune cell, the HIV has simply disappeared. The patient has been free of HIV for about 2 years. Some physicians at UCLA have developed a similar therapy and plan to commercialize it."
I'll be really interested to see if this result can be replicated.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Is there a way to create or replicate this bone marrow? Or will this immune donor be continually used for every AIDS patient in the world? How many natural immune donors are there? I think only a few. But still interesting.
1) Be born with natural HIV immunity.
2) Sell bone marrow to desperate people.
3) Profit!
Over the years, I've witnessed probably 640 articles on a cure for HIV either having been discovered, or very near.
So before I get all excited and start fucking everything that moves without a condom, is this for real? Or is this another one of those "cures for a small number (eg, 1) of patients, and cannot be turned into a general cure or vaccine for all?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
This sounds alot like the movie "I am legend"
Are there any tests to find out who has natural immunity to HIV?
And on a related note, how much can such a person expect to get for their bone marrow?
Is this immune bone marrow replicatable via stem cells?
The Wall Street Journal is a fine newspaper, but it is not a scientifically peer-reviewed journal. I'd wait and see what the peer review process decides about this proposed treatment. It would not be the first time that a "revolutionary" treatment has failed to prove itself in peer review.
Why oil price increase equals economic trouble (Score: Interesti
That was from a previous case,
"In 1989, Dr. Rossi had a case eerily similar to the one in Berlin ..."
not this case.
Good job Germans, bring that karma back up to about neutral!
All joking aside, this could be an amazing breakthrough if it could be commercialized. And since when have people been "HIV Immune"? I've never heard of that shit.
Was HIV isolated before he began operating?
Using a condom kills the spontaneity of getting fucked up the ass by a complete stranger at airport bathrooms.
Larry Craig? (I assume Larry Bagina would be your incognito name?)
You just got troll'd!
Yeah, because clearly only gay men contract HIV and obviously the only way that gay men hook up is anonymously in airport bathrooms.
He just stole the idea from Omega Man. He needs to give Heston the credit he deserves.
I am immune to HIV/AIDS and have tones of student debt! Where is the market for my bone marrow? Where do I start?
I mean other than the downsides of a bone marrow transplant actually being one of the riskiest procedures around, often killing anything up to 20% of recipients within a couple of weeks. Maybe after all drug treatment options have failed this might be a good idea.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
The return of free sex is near!
Seems to me that, to start with, you'd need at least one sample of marrow from the different blood-types (I think marrow-types and blood-types are pretty much related, marrow creating blood and all). Once you have that, you can transplant recipients. Once the recipient is clean and (presumably again) their own marrow is making antibodies, the recipient could become a donor.
So maybe if every recipient had to legally become a donor after being HIV-free (and free of other diseases that could transfer through marrow/blood), then the resistant marrow could then be produced and distributed almost exponentially...
The dude who is immune is clearly a case of evolution. Survival of the fittest.
Gero Hutter is the new Gutter Hero! :-)
My late mother had a bone marrow transplant (BMT) to treat her pre-leukemic condition and try to prevent it from becoming full-bore leukemia. To do this, they blasted her whole body with radiation (sorry, don't know which frequency), which killed her existing bone marrow. They then inserted/transplanted his sister's bone marrow. Now, I am not a doctor, so I'm probably leaving out a lot of important steps here. But because of the radiation dosage, she lost her hair, a lot of weight, and the ability to keep food in her for any length of time.
Yes, we knew this was coming. In fact, she had worked as a radiation oncologist for decades before her diagnosis with myelodysplasia. The irony abound.
Unfortunately, either the transplant didn't take or the weakness was too much for her. She passed away on November 16, 1999. Two weeks after I'd gotten married. And some of you may remember my then-wife from what happened five months later. Yeah, life kinda sucked.
I do want to see the HIV/AIDS pandemic curbed, and I do what I can to help people who have it live a little better. But a BMT is a major, major procedure. It's not guaranteed to be a death sentence, but it's not guaranteed to work, either. Is it worse than HIV/AIDS? That question is beyond my pay level to try and answer. I just have one story from one BMT that unfortunately did not go well. I am thankful that no one in my family has had HIV/AIDS. But I just don't know if this is the best way to deal with it once someone is infected.
-- haaz.
Sure, I'll leave it to them to do that, if you'll at least leave it to a US institution to invest in a ton of experimentation, research, development, refinement of the techniques, overcoming regulatory hurdles, patient trials...
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Good luck getting coverage for that kind of treatment. Probable responses: "The vat of pills you take every day is much cheaper. Claim denied." Or, "Experimental - denied."
If this truly works on a large scale, this particular treatment will unfortunately be for the upper class only.
...sad but true (the part about making a profit)... ...though to be fair, to commercialize does also imply that they would be trying to expand the number of people to whom the treatment can be given to. Currently, it's only one person treated, under the guise of a highly talented doctor and his research team.
Sometimes, seemingly ingenious ideas never get out of the research stage because the processes involved can't be replicated on a wider scale. (of course, there are other reasons why some ingenious ideas never see the light of day, but that's beyond the scope of this discussion)
... it's being commercialized. Leave it to a U.S. institution to be concerned with profiting from a possible cure for HIV.
Okay, would you be happier if an institution or organization from some other country was commercializing it or profiting from it? Or are you one of these people that believes that drugs and treatments should made available to all for free, via some magical process that has zero cost of production?
I don't quite get your point, I'm afraid.
And peoples descended from them, are immune, smaller percentages from central asia.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The article mentions that the mortality rate from this procedure is 30%, which precludes widespread replication as it is only used in late-stage cancer patients. Thus, while the CCR5 mutation is promising, they need another method (besides bone marrow transplant) to deliver the therapy. This leads to gene therapy, but that has other issues (such as causing leukemia as a side effect).
Most of what I've read about so-called natural immunity isn't really immunity per-se. People with immunity still carry the HIV virus; It just doesn't turn into AIDS for a long time, but in a lot of cases, eventually it overcomes the immunity. Here's an article on one such study [BBC].
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
It's fascinating that Evolution has managed to find a "cure" for this disease through random mutations more quickly than decades of brilliant minds and lots of money. Hooray for mass parallelism. Once we have computers capable of simulating this, we'll be able to solve some amazing problems. I have no idea how complex such a simulation is or how far off that would be.
A tax-payer funded institution at that.
THL phish sticks
BMT is a major, major procedure.
With about 30% mortality, I've read.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Heaven forbid that the people who spend a lifetime looking for a cure and pouring billions of dollars into research get reimbursed for their work.
Are you suggesting that HIV doesn't exist? Are you suggesting those that work to get educated all the way up to PhD level do not deserve to make money (because the company that makes money needs to pay its employees)?
If you want reproducible proof that HIV exists, I'd suggest you check a little place called Africa where HIV/AIDS is a plague in every sense of the word.
Respectfully, what the F@$#% are you talking about?
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
You mean its not? Damn, I been waiting here at LAX for over 3 hours now...
Even then, the first man with transplanted heart also died several days after the operation (pneumonia, if I recall correctly), yet it didn't stop heart transplantation from becoming kind of "routine".
Troll 2.0 Fear my asocial networking!
It's interesting to look at this in the context of evolution.
Viruses and bacteria have a distinct evolutionary advantage in mutating far more quickly and being far more numerous. Thus they can develop immunities to cures more quickly than humans can develop immunities to the diseases.
On the other hand, we have the technology to identify and isolate the gene that grants us immunity, and then manufacture a cure without having to wait thousands of years for natural selection to make us all immune.
The bad news: about 30% of people who get bone marrow transplants don't survive the procedure,
But the people who currently get bone marrow transplants are already in very bad shape to survive surgery - far worse than a person who has aids. Most bone marrow transplants are done to cure leukemia or some similar disease that damages blood cells. These blood cells includes platelets which are necessary for coagulating blood. If your blood does not coagulate well, you don't have a good chance of surviving surgery.
So the very disease that makes bone marrow transplants necessary often prevents the patient from surviving the surgery to cure it. With AIDS patients, this would not be a problem, so one could expect a better survival rate.
try to avoid it at all cost... what use is getting healed when you start talking like Marx afterwards? ;)
I have done my research and I have concluded that Aids is caused by Hiv. I have also concluded that Aids denialism is motivated solely by politics and economics: it is just an attempt by evil irresponsible governments to stop giving money for supporting Hiv sufferers. They prefer to let them die than help them, and to support their position they claim that Aids is not caused by Hiv and that it can be cured just by better nutrition etc. In this way they try to avoid paying for public healthcare and medicines or other proper treatments. It's all pure greed.
In the article it states that they are fairly sure that some HIV still exists in the patient's body. Although none has been detectable in blood samples for over 600 days.
They are not completely sure if the extreme chemotherapy and other stuff they do to kill your bone marrow just happened to kill off most of the HIV, or if the new marrow has in fact started producing the new white blood cells and the HIV simply can not infect them.
It also states that something along the lines of around 1% of the population has this genetic mutation.
They cite another case that a person was giving a bone marrow transplant with similar chemotherapy, but they died shortly afterward from a tumor. No traces of HIV could be found in this persons body, but they are unsure if the transplanted marrow had the mutation that this article is about.
On a final note, the article states that most people do not survive the extreme chemotherapy required to kill off bone marrow and that it is only given to late state cancer patients.
Due to the low amount of donors (in the world) with the "HIV-Free" mutation and the extreme risk involved with marrow transplants this is probably not going to be "functionally" curing you, proactively or retroactively, of HIV any time soon.
Graft vs. host disease kills many transplant patients a year. Cure might be worse than the disease.
Ok, I'll admit this sounds like a neat concept for curing someone with HIV, but wouldn't you just be trading all of the consequences of having HIV/AIDS for the consequences of being a bone marrow transplant recipient? One of the most feared complications of bone marrow transplantation is graft-versus-host disease. The treatment for GVHD is...immunosuppression. So HIV patients who receive this treatment would have to face the possibility of being no better off than they were pre-treatment and potentially much, much worse (graft vs-host is a horrible condition).
Does this or does this not still leave the recipient as an HIV carrier?
I hope these operations for people who got AIDS by accident. No one who earned AIDS by promiscuous sexual behavior deserves to get these limited resources.
Don't worry. I'm sure God will come up with something even more dastardly to punish them. Maybe it will even involve EDS.
Stick Men
government sponsored racism must end! write to your representatives and senators and tell them that it's an outrage that our tax dollars go to help people based on race.
What relevance do sexually transmitted diseases have here?
If you haven't made a developer cry, you've wasted a day.
Cloning
But I just don't know if this is the best way to deal with it once someone is infected.
I'd say it isn't, given the nature of a bone marrow transplant (such things always seems so easy on TV.) Still, there may be other ways to transfer this genetic protection to an individual (a retrovirus maybe) so this qualifies as significant progress.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Indeed, often times it's easier to get consent from people that are nearing end of life. While the standards for what is and is not OK for experimentation doesn't really get more liberal it tends to be easier to get volunteers when it's a +- 6 months proposition than in other cases.
It's all pure greed.
Partly greed, I suppose, and partly because the resources being devoted to HIV/AIDS research aren't free, and other important venues are being underfunded or defunded. Resources are limited, no matter where you are, and public health isn't about dealing with only the medical conditions that get the most media attention. AIDS is not like, say, a food-borne illness that can strike anyone at any time, and there are people suffering from other serious ailments than AIDS.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Yeah, because clearly only gay men contract HIV and obviously the only way that gay men hook up is anonymously in airport bathrooms.
and only gay men get fucked in the ass
Make the bone marrow donor recipient donate his new bone marrow after he's immune at least twice. Kind of like the gift that keeps on giving.
After several generations of that I might expect weird problems to show up in the marrow.
..........FULL STOP.
Done, or done for? Whether this cure is the prize from bone-cracking, back-breaking, or just plain old scintillating responses, that this science is making progress could be "God's" work to once again show human (especially a number of majoq, organized yet divisive churches) their odious, insidious, insipid and myopic and discriminatory ways must be overcome and shamed or, hopefully, enlightened out of existence. This is great science!
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Making money off of a disease which is very much kept in the vague, unclear, opaque situation is evil.
Where is the reproducible proof that HIV exists?
Where is the reproducible proof that HIV causes AIDS?
Go to the (American-run but internationally funded and popular) National Centre for Biotechnology Information here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez ...and type "HIV" into the search box. You'll get just under 192,000 peer-reviewd articles from groups all over the world, funded by various governments, public and private companies, charities and rich donors. Anything from HIV genome sequences and molecular sctructures through molecular biology, disease progression, transmission studies, all the way to local- regional- and global epidemiological studies. The evidence is pretty damn strong and well understood from the atomic level up to the global level.
Altenatively, click on the "Reviews" tab and it'll give you a mere 24,000 articles assessing, collating and criticising the others. Have fun!
True for HIV, True for HPV.
True for whatever.
When you've finsihsed the HIV evidence, feel free to look up the 15,000 HPV articles (or just 12,600 if you restrict your seach to "HPV AND cancer"). The HPV thing is actually very easy: most viruses carry genes evolved to push cells into their growth phase, because that forces the cells to release and synthesise resources that the virus must hijack to replicate. HPV-associated cancer happens when the viral gene gets incorporated into the cell's DNA (rare, but through well-established mechanisms) and get permanently switched on, making the cell grow and divide constantly. Any biology undergrad could tell you that if you asked. It's more common in the cervix simply because it's out of sight, and doesn't get noticed until it's really big and nasty. (Which is why all sexually actve women should be screened: catch it within the first 5 years and the cure rate is better than 98%. It's an easy cure if you *find* it)
THINK first. Do your research.
My undergraduate degree is in virology and I've just finished a PhD looking at how viruses interact with cancer and parts of the immune system. I've done plenty of thinking, and a hell of a lot o research. Now it's time for *you* to think, and for *you* to do some fucking research.
You're no better than the creatioists who say that evolution's impossible but have never botheres to get a fcuking clue how it actually works.
My late mother had a bone marrow transplant (BMT) to treat her pre-leukemic condition and try to prevent it from becoming full-bore leukemia. To do this, they blasted her whole body with radiation (sorry, don't know which frequency), which killed her existing bone marrow. They then inserted/transplanted his sister's bone marrow.
Your mother was a man?
I call bullshit.
I don't have the bug... and even if you do get it, I'll pay for your bone marrow transplant when my tax check gets here.
Wow. Someone gets cured and you complain about it not being good enough. Boo on you. The issue is that someone *did* get cured.
While this patient *did* have radiation done, ideally I hope the radiation would be unnecessary with more study. Maybe just implant some marrow producing HIV immune white blood cells (or better, HIV destroying cells) to maintain health. A better way of living with the disease would be acceptable too, right now.
At least you could live with the HIV if you had bone marrow producing immune T-cells. Ideally, there will be a better way to remove the cells hosting the HIV than radiation with future research. Something cheaper, faster, and easier.
This *is* a *big* step, your criticizing aside. A proof of concept. Curing someone with a process that can potentially be repeated!
1. Prove the process works.
2. Look for ways to simplify and improve.
3. And now you have something that can be applied (cheaply?) to large groups.
-- Life is good. Tastes like chicken.
1) Be born with natural HIV immunity.
2) Sell bone marrow to desperate people.
3) ???
4) Profit!
There, now it complies with internationally accepted business-model obscufication protocols.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Someone I know died of AIDS...
Naturally-resistant bone marrow is probably worth what, about 5 million dollars per gram?
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
First, of course, bone marrow transplants are very risky. The fatality rate is around 20%.
Lacking CCR5 provides HIV immunity, but increases susceptibility to West Nile virus. In that, it's similar to the genetic difference that enables sickle-cell anemia. People with that mutation are less susceptible to malaria.
This is progress, although a long way from a useful treatment.
In other words, exactly what the German team did?
Which is why this kind of work should be publicly funded until it hits the commercialization stages. As in "here's the newest approved drug, everybody go to it producing it."
Dr. Gero Hutter? Did you mean Dr. Hero Gutter!?
You know, i wish people like you would get over it. It costs money to live. Doctors and researches need to get paid. It is precisely because of this that we have the innovations we have in medicines.
His name is Dr. Gero? I for one welcome our Red Ribbon-wearing, AIDS-resistant, cellular android overlords. Kamehameha!
Don't these people read their Dragonball? This is all part of his plan to create invincible androids, to take over the world!
This sounds like you'd need to add bone marrow, rather than replace it. As I understand it, bone marrow transplants are performed in leukemia because the marrow itself is cancerous, and so destroying it is important. But that's not the case here, so it's at least possible that it's not as dangerous as the procedure that would be performed on people with leukemia.
It's still likely to be major surgery, of course, with all the attendant risks of any transplant, but it might not be quite that bad.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Isn't this like, amazingly big news?! I mean, someone cured HIV! I didn't even know there was such thing as a natural immunity to it. So what happens next?
Not at all. Currently various US government agencies estimate the value of a human life at 5-10 million USD. They use this number to figure out things like pollution limits and whether mandatory seatbelt installation is a good idea.
A billion dollars could save MANY lives if used some other way, ie converting a coal power plant to solar-thermal.
Thank you Captain Delusional.
Hey, Jason. Do you have a new personal homepage? Your old one has been gone for ages.
I have had a bone marrow transplant. No radiation, minimal chemo-like drugs. In the hospital a week or a week and a half, 6 months of outpatient monitoring and I was cured.
For the AIDS treatment to work, they would most likely use something closer to my transplant protocol than the full oblation that they use with cancer patients.
Note to those interested: They dont have to go in with needles or drills to "dig out" the bone marrow from the donor. They give you a drug call the "G" that causes your bone marrow to percolate into your bloodstream. Then they filter it out with a dialysis-type procedure. Its fairly painless. I had it done to save my own marrow in case something went wrong with the transplant.
... it's being commercialized. Leave it to a U.S. institution to be concerned with profiting from a possible cure for HIV.
I don't see you donating your life savings to this. You expect people to do this at a loss, but not you. Hmm.... there needs to be a new word to describe hypocrisy on the internet. Hypotroll? Nah, that sounds too much like hypnotoad...
With about 30% mortality, I've read.
So... 70% immortality?
Sign me up!
If HIV becomes a thing of the past, what condition will "doctors" fraudulently say is preventable with the mutilation that is male circumcision?
He's not criticizing, just accounting a real experience. Adding that people can live with HIV for several (many?) years, so there is a very good chance that in the near future any patient can get a treatment or cure less invasive and with a better success probability than the article's case. And agreed, this is time to congratulate the physicians for this cure.
Nobody is against the people doing the research being compensated. I highly doubt a medical biologist is incapable of choosing a job based upon his compensation, financial, altruistic, or otherwise.
I assume what most people are against is a megagiant pharmaceutical (or other) corporation exploiting a global medical breakthrough to enhance their "bottom line" at the cost of human life.
" Some physicians at UCLA have developed a similar therapy and plan to commercialize it."
Not "in the know" on this one, do doctors PATENT procedures? Is there some guy/s out there, essentially holding the cure to AIDs, that has the RIGHT to withhold such a procedure from common use, if they are not paid?
If so, wouldn't the intentional withholding of such a treatment from a patient, for whatever reason, be a direct violation of the Hippocratic Oath, and thus grounds for the revocation of a medical license?
Pretty obvious I am out of my realm, eh? Serious questions though.....
We're probably evolving faster than ever before,
for two reasons. The first is a greater number
of people to get mutations. The second is the
tremendous changes in our environment.
Look at the factors that determine how many
decendents (grandkids, etc.) a person will have.
The biggest selection force is birth control.
We're being selected to DESIRE actual kids,
not merely sex. We're also being selected to
be irresponsible, be dumb, and have menstrual
cycles that require higher doses of birth
control pills to suppress.
The next biggest selection force is diet. We're
being selected to tolerate or dislike all the
normal junk food. We're being selected to crave
vegetables or do without them.
The next biggest selection force is addictive
substances. We'll be less affected by it, or
we'll desire it less.
Never imagine for a moment that humans can be
immune to natural selection. Just look around
you, and you can see the forces at work.
Sooner or later someone must stand up to rid our society of this sickness that has befallen us.
Hilarious. You really believe that crap. Get a life.
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
You ignored the above part of my statement. Like you said, nobody is against the researchers being compensated. But if I'm a large company and I fund said research (and with AIDS we're talking billions and billions of dollars), and then want to make a profit off of it, I'm "exploiting" the medical breakthrough? Using that logic, do restaurants exploit hungry people?
What we really need is a cure for American Corporations
HIV denial is dangerous. There is overwhelming evidence that HIV exists and causes AIDS. You need to ask yourself whether promoting the *very* unlikely notion that HIV/AIDS is a big conspiracy is ethical justifiable given that, if you are wrong, you are indirectly contributing to the spread of HIV/AIDS and it's horrible consequences, unnecessary and painful deaths.
UCLA? The public university, publically funded? That US institution?
sorry about your mom.. the symtomns of BMT transplant are kinda like what a person goes through before they die of AIDS. We need to perfect this.
The only way to bust a doper--is when you yourself become a smoker!
I don't like them.
They give you a drug call the "G" that causes your bone marrow to percolate into your bloodstream.
That sounds like one of those beneficial uses of chemical weapons research. ick
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
fortunately, for the "HIV-curing" bone marrow transplant to work, you don't need to first kill off all the host bone marrow. Just clear out a major location, such as the hips or femurs and reintroduce the donor cells.
With leukemia, the original bone marrow is the problem. With HIV, it is the lack of functional products of the bone marrow.
And whilst I 100% agree with the post above - I am HIV positive (thanks to an unfortunate accident) - I was extremely sick and getting more so.
My blood results were getting worse each test.
I now take anti-retro viral drugs.
the Virus is undetectable
there are side effects but they are manageable and I am a productive member of the workforce again.
If the science is too difficult for you - the empirical evidence is very strong - and I have seen it with my own eyes. Control HIV - you stay alive and well. If you dont - trust me - you go downhill fast !
Induced pluripotent stemcell processes can be used to effectively grow needed bone marrow, congrats to the medical community for making HIV an ineffective disease.
"Some physicians at UCLA have developed a similar therapy and plan to commercialize it."
Enough is enough. The demand factors that will go into this "commercialization" will put this out of reach of many who would seek it, despite success rates of these transplants. As if HIV wasn't a death sentence in today's world. While this isn't an end-all, be-all cure against the disease (Mod parent up Informative!), "commercialization" only puts procedures like this out of reach for people in both high-density population areas, and areas of high infection rates, like urban centers in South Africa and its neighbors. The Previous Poster was right about how it would be valued - "Naturally-resistant bone marrow is probably worth what, about 5 million dollars per gram?" This is unacceptable to curb populace infection densities.
The thing about this is, if I'm understanding it right, is that the radiation part is not needed for this, as the HIV is already keeping the immune system sufficiently suppressed, allowing for a graceful transition from the old marrow to the new marrow.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
You sound like one of the large number of Americans who also believe that the sun revolves around he earth, who don't believe in evolution, and other nonscientific beliefs. You can sustain any belief by only listening to the sources that corroborate it, and in a free society you can find support for *anything*. The main problem is that with the freedom of speech (only) in America there's also the apparent non-freedom (or un-PC-ness) to call BS what it is. That goes from global warming deniers all the way to Rush Limbaugh. Interestingly enough, it is generally limited to one corner of society.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Eloquence and information FTW.
The CB App. What's your 20?
STD cases are rising every year (NON-CUMULATIVE figures, of course), yet where are all the teenagers dying from 'AIDS'?
The fast answer is that HIV is not a highly contagious disease. In fact, compared to something like measles -- or HPV or active herpes -- it is actually quite difficult to catch HIV. The reason we focus so much attention on it, however, is because unlike herpes or genital warts, you die from it.
That is, until recently. Compared to 1981, we have quite a lot of experience treating AIDS. In fact, the clinical definition of AIDS an HIV-positive patient with fewer than 200 T-cells per cubic millimeter of blood. By definition, if we can stop your T-cells from dying, you don't get AIDS. (But if we stop treating you, you do.)
Other than that, it's 2008. To say that HIV does not cause AIDS at this late stage in the game is akin to denying evolution. The amount of scientific evidence linking HIV to AIDS is simply overwhelming.
I'm not at the tail end of a PhD in biology or anything close, but even I know this much. You do yourself a disservice by approaching scientific topics with blinkers on.
Breakfast served all day!
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Disprove it. You have that ability. Or can't you? The numbers are there. You're being proven wrong and all you can come back with was that shit? Proves that the new liberalism is full of lies and liars who attack with no backing.
just keep up your racism bitch.
of course it should be publicly funded until it is given to the private sector for commercialization: big pharma did not get any bail out recently, so we owe them as much!
I hope Dr. Gero doesn't start making androids next..
My doc tells me I'm a CCR5 Delta 32 mutant too. That said, this is very interesting.
In a bone marrow transplant first you have to kill off the existing bone marrow. That means you deny the virus the ability to reproduce and by replacing it with CCR5 Delta 32 marrow, it can't invade the cells.
Apparently the CCR5 Delta 32 mutation is pretty common in European populations like Ireland, England, Italy etc. It came from the time of the plagues, it conferred immunity to the bubonic strains.
This is significantly different from a cancer based transplant where they first have to kill the existing bone marrow. They are adding immunity rather than destroying and replacing. This should be not much more than an out patient type procedure.
...I will save on condoms.
>>You'll get just under 192,000 peer-reviewd articles from groups all over the world
Peer-reviewed.
>>You're no better than the creatioists who say that evolution's impossible but have never botheres to get a fcuking clue how it actually works.
Creationists. Fucking.
"These guys came up to me; "Hey buddy... We're christians and we don't like what your saying." "Then forgive me." Later when I was hanging from the tree!" Although I am wondering where the fucking in the streets is going on, He was spot on with hypocritical christians.
Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.
In the words of Homer Simpson... dooooooh!
Herpes?
Will the newly "immune" people be carriers of HIV?
And then charge 2500 times the cost of producing the drug to the sick and dieing before they can have it.
I trust US pharmaceuticals to profit, hugely, from the sick. I trust them to prefer 'treatment' over cures because theres no money in a healthy populace.
US medical companies haven't done any real research in decades, whats the last disease we cured? when was it? They tweak their drugs just enough to renew the patents, and thats it.
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
So if AIDS is a curse from God on all those nasty, sinful homosexuals (as alleged by so many fundamentalist preachers you can't count them all), how is it that some German guy came up with a cure?
Has God downgraded the sentence for being gay from Death to Painful Operation?
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
G-CSF. Fairly fascinating.
Wikipedia article
People have a tendency to make typos when they are upset. The parent poster was understandably upset about the ignorance on display in the grandparent post.
-Mike
I'm sorry; I don't know what I was thinking!
BMT is a major, major procedure.
With about 30% mortality, I've read.
-jcr
30% isn't bad considering that AID's is 100% fatal. (well, most people die of something else but the cause of the second illness is AIDs)
Obama = Socialism.
Dr. Gero Hutter
Anyone read that as Dr Guitar Hero?
Ah, I need my morning coffee ...
My undergraduate degree is in virology and I've just finished a PhD looking at how viruses interact with cancer and parts of the immune system. I've done plenty of thinking, and a hell of a lot o research.
Pwnage!
The drug is Granulocyte Macrophage Colony Stimulating Factor (GM-CSF) if anyone wants to look it up. It's just a growth hormone that you have produced in your body naturally. They just give you a *lot* of it, causing your stem cells to start dividing. Some stay in your bone marrow, the excess cells move out into the bloodstream, from which they can be painlessly extracted.
I know someone who's had cells extracted that way, and she described it like Marrow (very apt name!) does. The hormone treatment made her feel like she had a cold coming for about a week, and the extraction procedure (required about 2 hours sitting in a comfy chair) was just "really boring".
If you sign up to be a bone marrow donor (you should if you can! Brits check out the Anthony Nolan Trust), that's what you're signing up to do: feel like you have a mild cold, be bored for two hours and hopefully save someone's life.
Very rarely (more common in people 50+) the drug doesn't work well and they do ask if they ca take your cells directly from the bone. I know a woman who had this done too. She stayed in hospital for 2 days after, rested in bed for another 2 days and was back in work after a week. It wasn't great fun, but it healed up perfectly and painlessly after a few weeks. She said it was definately worth it to try saving someone's life.
There is a national version of a "conscience clause" in the works and it allows anybody involved with medical care, from ambulance drivers to doctors, to deny service based on their own personal beliefs. The 2008 bill expands this provision to include "care" as an activity that an organization may refuse to provide based on a moral or religious objection. This will allow organizations who receive U.S. funds to deny services to those whose behavior, identity, religion, or other attributes may be deemed objectionable. Scary stuff
"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" Franklin
Why isn't this the top headline on every media outlet? This is really big news. It may not be "the cure" but it's a big step.
Posters like Slashbugs here are why /. is worth coming to.
A HAH! I'm not a geek! PhDs read slashdot too... I'm a genius!!!
Mod parent up. This needs to get out.
I know this is kind of redundant, but nice one! It's been the fashion for ignorant neocon sock-pupppets (both direct and indirect by way of meme transfer amongst the insufficiently non-stupid) to play the supposedly well informed skeptic on various scientific issues.
These people tend to be somewhat articulate and superficially intelligent and they typically minister to the usual suspects. They need to be laughed off the fucking internet.
Does not sound like a universal solution for AIDS. You must be lucky enough to find an HIV-immune person who also is a donor match. That sounds like a tall order.
"You can't allow somebody to commit the crime before you detain them." [Condoleezza Rice]
I though Magic Johnson got cured years ago, it is just that no one talks about it.
The drug is filgrastim. I went through this just a month ago as an unrelated allogenic donor, then filtered with more of an apheresis-type procedure, but that's just being pedantic. :)
by the way the media etc talks I wouls have though a lot more then 25 million people have been killed by AIDS
in the last 20 years. I mean that only twice as many as are killed by auto accidents. what happened to 1 out of every 4 people contracting it or something like that from back in the 80's. Seems like something must be working to slow it down.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
They have been talking about aspects of an approach like this for sometime. It's interesting to hear that it has been put into practice. My knowledge is probably pretty dated, but I do remember talk and research being conducted that centered either around bone marrow or the thymus.
I seem to remember one paper from several years ago where they were using a condition called Myesthenia Gravis as a road map to finding a way to stimulate the immune system to produce T-Cells. As background, Myesthenia Gravis or MG is a condition where a defect in the thymus sends the immune system into overdrive, over producing T-Cells to the point where the T-Cells start to interfere with acetalcholine receptors on neurons creating a neurologic condition.
Appearantly it's not just the number of T-Cells, it's the type of T-Cell meaning that the thymus probably wasn't the key.
Sure, I'll leave it to them to do that, if you'll at least leave it to a US institution to invest in a ton of experimentation, research, development, refinement of the techniques, overcoming regulatory hurdles, patient trials...
Sure, I'll leave it to them to do that, if you'll at least leave it to a US institution to invest in a ton of marketing.
There, fixed it for ya.
This is a brilliant career path. No more work - just a now and then donate some bone marrow to people who would be willing to pay a lot of money as it is a life or death situation!!
I see a lot of talk about people who are refused treatment and such, but I have seen no mention of the people who refuse to get treated or to stop spreading the disease. My wife worked as a case management RN and set up an AIDS/HIV clinic intended to supply free treatment to those who could not afford it. The issue they had was that a lot of these people do not want to be bothered by treatment. They seem to either not give a shit because their lives are already hell or they assume that because they have it they are going to die so they do not want to be bothered. To me the biggest problem with HIV/AIDS are the people who still go out there sharing needles and engaging in unsafe sex. I think that needs to be prosecuted a lot more vigorously. I have seen spouses who were dying because their significant other was going out on the DL and brought home a nice case of HIV/AIDS (I used to be a MLT/phlebot). The guy that did that should be prosecuted for murder.
Well spotted, thanks for pointing out my mistakes.
Behold the power of peer review!
I've seen several friends in the US be denied medications because the pharmacist didn't agree with their sexuality, or their sex. There have been thousands of cases of women being denied birth control under this law.
just cause you've never had it happen to you doesn't mean it doesn't happen to anyone.
the preceding post was not spell checked... suck it.
Black president AND a cure for AIDS??? Dave Chappelle was on to something!
The 'known' relation between HIV and AIDS is not accepted by the critics. They say:
The virus has not been isolated.
The isolation has not been done in the open.
Nobody has replicated isolating HIV.
As I udnerstand it:
The virus needs to be isolated at various patients,
The pations must not carry other virusses, diseases.
Then the patients get AIDS which has to be caused by HIV (which has to be proven).
AIDS is a complex of *known* diseases.
Perhaps caused by the expen$ive medication.
Why wasn't all this cleared up after ~30 years of AIDS? Why didn't medication go down in price?
Why is the medication so bad that you get AIDS-like symptoms?
Why do HIV+ people recover or at least lead a healthy life without medication?
I don't know for sure. I don't have HIV nor AIDS, I won't let them test me.
I am not a doctor or virus-wizard.
I am just an interested party.
So no flame-bait, just what they write.
AIDS/HIV research is much shadier than flu research. Why?
This isn't a cure, it is a transplant. The disease itself wasn't stopped. It is like saying they cured heart disease with a heart transplant or TB with a lung transplant.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Don't be such a fucking retard, SlashBugs (1339813).
anyway, if they knew about this cure, why didn't we know sooner?
fuck you SlashBugs (1339813), fcuk you.
What a HORRIBLY inappropriate comment! ...and yet I laughed for about 15 seconds or so. *sigh*
30% isn't bad considering that AID's is 100% fatal
Except that the 30% is within days of the treatment, and the 100% is over a decade or so.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
30% mortality within a few weeks, then. You pedant.
AIDS is people too.
post. Gee, someone couldn't accidentally "sleep with the wrong person" who HAPPENS TO BE A DRUG USER. A lot of non-drug user, straight people get infected due to drug users getting infected. You fucking moron. You're in the same class as Catholics who wont dole out birth control. You make me sick. Your specious logic is laughable.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
p.s. here's a good comment that helps explain why you're full of shit: http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1023173&cid=25697193
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=refused+to+fill+my+prescription+based+on+legal+grounds&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f&oq=
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Actually, even our for-profit pharmaceutical corporations get a LOT LOT LOT of government grants. But of course, corporations don't accent this fact, because then people like you wouldn't be able to spout excuses like you just spouted.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Are you trying to say that you lead a war torn African country?
Trust me, most people who sleep with the wrong person know that they are druggies, or they are too naive and the Darwin process is merely in action. If that makes me a fucking moron for recognizing it, than what does it make you, a naive moron? And what does that have to do with Catholics who won't dole out birth control? You think that people who want birth control MUST go to the Catholic Church to get some? It's called CVS Pharmacy, you fucking retard. Go, like, read a fucking book or step in front of a train. Either way you might do us all a big favor.
You must've missed the response posts where I basically dismantled his argument. I think your bad karma has more to do with being a fucking retard than not giving a fuck. You are too stupid to give a fuck, it has nothing to do with choice.
oh i get it. i missed the posts that are out there "somewhere" where you actually make sense. i suspect i'll live.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
and what do you do when the person at CVS refuses to give you your prescription because they have idiotic judgmental views (you know -- like yours). If you say it doesn't happen, then you have no clue how to use google. Mostly, though, you are a disgusting individual, up there with the likes of George Bush. You think people get what they deserve. That is actually a tenet of Satanism.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
I posted direct replies to the post you referenced. I wouldn't expect you to catch this though, as you obviously have the intelligence blinders on.
I provided a link of a comment I liked earlier. You could perhaps do the same and provide me the link to the comment that you are supposedly referring to.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
p.s. I used to not know where it said what your karma was, but I just checked, and mine is actually Excellent. Not that it matters. My signature is parody. As much parody as you are of a compassionate human being.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com