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HIV Transmission Captured On Video
Technology Review has promising news on the AIDS front: researchers have captured HIV T cell transmission on video. The upshot could be new avenues of treatment. "The resulting images and videos show that, once an infected cell adheres to a healthy cell, the HIV proteins... migrate within minutes to the contact site. At that point, large packets of virus are simultaneously released by the infected cell and internalized by the recipient cell. This efficient mode of transfer is a distinct pathway from the cell-free infection that has been the focus of most prior HIV studies, and reveals another mechanism by which the virus evades immune responses that can neutralize free virus particles within the body."
I always found biology quite fascinating. All those little buggers that can kill a human just by sheer numbers. Always scared me a little.
I have an idea how to stop HIV and it involves the same technology found in terminator seeds.
In a nutshell, the government sanctions the agricultural giant Monsanto to engineer a new strain of HIV virus with a limited lifespan beyond a certain generation with ability to recode the DNA as it progresses. This virus could be hostile to all the known HIV strains out in the wild and force them out. People voluntarily get infected with this new virus as means of guarding against incurable HIV infections. Since this new virus can be regulated upon demand, Monsanto can then minimize the damage for a low monthly fee by supplying you with various off switches to reduce the infection. They could set up various plans depending on your budget. Silver and Gold plans would have limited side effects to encourage you to upgrade to the Platinum plan and get better viral sterilization methods.
I think this could work.
Celebrity virus, Survivor HIV, The smallest loser, The amazing erased....
this blurb reads like researcher have been ignoring cell-to-cell contamination for the last 20 years and only tried to get a cure for "free virus" to cell contamination. I hope it's not what actually happened that would be sad. Nice video though.
Due to AIDS.
Protein dynamics can be affected by alterations to the protein itself. In this case, the gag protein had GFP inserted into it. GFP itself dimerizes weakly, and would add some size and weight to the protein. Does anyone know how they are sure what they're seeing matches normal Gag dynamics? The paper says "This virus faithfully reveals Gag localization, allowing infected cells and viral particles to be tracked with high sensitivity" citing an earlier paper by the same authors. That paper showed that it was not behaving like GFP alone (and was mostly over my head), but I didn't notice anything that proved the modified GAG behaved exactly like normal GAG. The protein does seem to be doing it's job and helping the virus infect, which suggests it's not rendering GAG useless, but doesn't prove it behaves in the exact same way.
It seems to me that if you're going to say "large packets of virus are simultaneously released by the infected cell and internalized by the recipient cell" that you should be sure those large packets of virus are normal and not just a result of adding GFP onto it. I'm not a virologist though, so I'm probably just missing something.
You'll just love this then. Humans have ten times more bacteria that human cells.
...is this tagged "pr0n"?! Does pr0n gives you AIDS?
I'd turned Adblock off for debugging on my browser - noticed annoying Real Basic ad on slashdot homepage. Is it me or anyone else has noticed the fact that these bastards are scamming on sqlite and other FOSS tools ?
Why do sites do it? The page linked in the article has at least three embedded videos that start playing all at once. Youtube is the worst offender. You click on a link to open it in the background so you can read it later (perhaps after you've finished reading the page it was linked from), and you hear all sorts of noise coming from your computer because the damn video started playing in the background already! STOP DOING THIS!
Just kidding.
Step 1: Take a sample of blood of the HIV - infected patient
Step 2: Put it in a blender that will evenly distribute white blood cell membranes throughout
Step 3: Inject sample back into HIV patient
Step 4: HIV infected cells' membranes are weakened when they contact white blood cell membranes
Step 5: HIV viruses are now without protection
Step 6: Inject antivirals into HIV patient
Step 7: Cure and PROFIT!
The "funny" thing about HIV is that, if it killed instantly (days or weeks) people would be MUCH more apt to be careful and NOT GET IT it because it's completely preventable aside from rape, unknowingly getting it through blood transfusions (rare) etc.
Sell tomorrow to enjoy today.
I think the interesting part about this discovery is that aids is traveling from cell to cell without the need to release virons to float around hoping to find a cell. I don't recall hearing about any other virus that spreads by cell-to-cell contact. It appears as though the infected cell press up against an uninfected cell, form a pocket between them (that is not connected to "outside" and then release some virons into this pocket. The virons contain the necessary "key" to get into a cell, but normally their odds are not good simply because they have to float around and hope to bump into a T cell, one at a time, in just the right way.
This process has several advantages. First, it's not wasting virons by simply multiplying them inside the cell until the cell bursts, leaving the virons to float around hoping for a chance contact. Second, since the body isn't being flooded with virons, it severely delays and slows the auto immune response of the body which isn't going to react anywhere near as fast to such a low-volume threat of a handful of virons leaking out now and then vs thousands popping onto the scene continually. Third, in addition to being hand-delivered to a target cell, there's a ton of them at the contact site concentrated right on the target cell's doorstep, not just one, so infection is pretty much guaranteed.
It's sort of the difference between a country sending an "army" to their enemy, by stirring up a villagefull of people to go attack on their own individually, vs assembling a strike force and attacking at one spot on the wall all at once. Clearly the latter is more effective.
Scarry stuff. AIDS looks to have evolved a very potent new method of infection. It's too bad we don't know more about how this process works. AIDS is probably throttling its viron production so the infected cell survives to infect other cells, rather than multiplying virons as fast as possible to get the most of them released into the body as fast as possible. Interferfon iirc slows the replication of AIDS virons inside the cell, so it makes sense that throttling an already throttled process should be an effective treatment.
If a cell has been taken over and is personally going to another cell and staging an attack, this may be a very difficult problem to overcome. Small, relatively inert virons can only hope for a chance contact in just the right way with a target cell. An entire cell coming to get you is a bit more like a bacteria problem, they have a heck of a lot more resources at their disposal. It's like the enemy taking over one of your tanks, vs coming at you as a walking soldier. Difference is, when the enemy "gets you", he doesn't destroy your tank... he dumps some men INTO your tank and now he has TWO tanks.
What this all boils down to is AIDS has found a new way to use the cells it hijacks. Most other viruses use them as self-destructing viron factories, and a few as places to hide and lay dormant for later relapse. But using cells as lingering attack platforms is just plain scarry.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
One would think that the discovery that HIV requires co-operation between cells to pass from one to the other, would constitute additional evidence that it isn't dangerous. What other viruses are like this?
Going from recent headlines, another aspect of HIV/AIDS theory which has quietly metamorphosed, is the explanation for why HIV+ is 5 times more prevalent in blacks - it used to be said that blacks are more promiscuous and engage in gay sex on the "down low"; now the difference is supposed to be due to genetic factors, as dissidents have been arguing all along.
The so-called "central dogma" of molecular biology states that proteins can't be decoded into RNA or DNA by cellular processes. So if immune cells want to share antibody sequences that they've evolved, they can't just decode each other's antibody proteins, they need something like retroviruses to transfer the DNA for such proteins directly, right? And we'd expect the level of such retroviruses to be higher in people whose immune systems are busy fighting diseases, such as patients with AIDS or TB, right? Just like HIV, right? But, of course, nobody wants to admit that 100,000s of otherwise healthy gays and blacks have been dispatched with poisonous drugs by an out of control pharmaceutical industry.
I would recommend Henry Bauer's "Questioning HIV/AIDS: Morally Reprehensible or Scientifically Warranted?" to anyone who is not familiar with this controversy.
Causality between a microorganism and disease is commonly established through the demonstration of Koch's Postulates. These are not hard-fast rules; some of Koch's Postulates are difficult to prove through ethical experiments. However, in the case of HIV, all of Koch's Postulates have been fulfilled:
Anti-retroviral therapy - while itself is quite dangerous and filled with side effects - has nevertheless been shown in numerous studies to reduce morbidity and mortality in HIV+ patients. Anti-retroviral therapy has also been compared to placebo, and its effects have been found to be beneficial over placebo. Other studies, mostly performed in Africa, have examined the "natural history" (i.e. the untreated progression) of HIV infection; such studies have shown that the natural history of HIV infection leads to the severe immunocompromise characteristic of the AIDS syndrome, followed by death.
Yes, there is plenty of money flowing into AIDS research and drugs. However, that fact fails to prove anything related to this discussion, one way or another. There was a point in time when the HIV-AIDS connection was, indeed, a hypothesis; many people cite evidence from that period of time in making the claim that HIV->AIDS is still a widely disputed theory. However, a careful examination of the current scientific evidence will reveal an overwhelming body of evidence supporting a causal relationship between HIV and AIDS.
I really thought this was going to be an idle article.
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/29215
The CIA killed Kennedy, nobody has actually landed on the moon, and Area 51 DOES have aliens.
FACT - As HIV viral levels rise, CD4 cells decrease.
FACT - When CD4 cells have dropped below 200/ul blood the patient will sooner or later develop opportunistic infections which will lead to Death.
FACT - Antiretroviral therapy decreases HIV viral levels and in most cases CD4 levels will rise thus saving the patient's life.
FACT - Almost every untreated HIV patient will develop AIDS and die.
FACT - Most HIV patients on antiviral medications never develop AIDS and continue to lead relatively health lives.
Even if HIV didn't cause AIDS it is a undisputable FACT that anti-HIV medications do work. It is possible to criticise the exorbitant prices of HIV treatments, but it is pure trolling accusing the pharma companies to sell HIV meds to people that don't need them.
So you would then be willing to have sex with a person off the opposite sex who is HIV positive? Since you think it is a 'gay' disease, then you are not at risk of infection?
I'm still not sold. Can anyone from Kansas grab a science book and find me the section about the weaknesses of this "theory"?
I am a v1ral sig. Plse c0py me and h3lp me spread. Thank y0u?
Object "Humor" apparently has no reference.
Shouldn't (1) include something like "and never found in abundance in organisms not suffering from the disease" ? I realize that (3) is attempting something like that but it isn't quite the same. Although it would be better if (3) said "always found to cause the disease" or something similar.
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
Blog postings from an anonymous nobody with no medical or biological education and training whatsoever. Yeah. That sounds credible.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
They way you say it would preclude carriers though.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Causality is different from virulence. You do not need modifiers like "always" or "never" to establish causality. A microorganism can cause disease in some individuals and not in others; it can cause disease sometimes, and other times not. This (somewhat frustrating) aspect of infectious disease results from the complexity of the interplay between the microbe, your body, your body's immune system, and the environment.
For example, you can have Hepatitis B virus floating around in your blood, but have no symptoms. That does not mean that there is not a distinct clinical syndrome caused by Hepatitis B; it just means that some people only "carry" the virus, and do not manifest the full-on disease.
As another example, the same bug that causes strep throat (Group A Streptococcus, S. pyogenes) is often found just chilling out in people's throats, causing no symptoms whatsoever. A lot of people who have gotten strep throat "a hundred times" are actually Strep carriers, and their repeated sore throats are often caused by viruses instead. However, that does not mean that Group A Strep doesn't cause strep throat. It just doesn't do it all the time.
Coming back to HIV, there are people with a genetic mutation in a chemokine receptor (CCR5) that prevents infection by HIV. It is believed that this receptor plays an important role in the HIV virus' ability to enter and infect a host cell. Similar phenomena of genetic protection from disease have been described for acute gastroenteritis ("stomach flu"), and a long list of other infectious diseases. It is speculated that the sickle cell trait (where you have one normal gene and one sickle cell gene, leading to a milder [often asymptomatic] form of the disease) is so prevalent among those of African descent owing to the partial protection that it provides against malaria.
Unfortunately, to date, no one has found an HIV-infected patient who, given enough time to live through the latent period (up to 10-20 years), did not eventually develop the clinical syndrome of AIDS. Part of the challenge in controlling the spread of HIV, and perhaps part of the reason behind the reluctance to accept causality between HIV and AIDS, is that the time between initial infection and clinically apparent disease is so long. The length of this latency period is, in part, a reflection of how much "safety factor" there is in the immune system. Your immune system has to suffer a pretty devastating insult before you begin to see symptoms.
The problem is how the industry defines AIDS. It is defined as having immune deficiency and HIV (except in Africa, where a whole host of diseases are called "AIDS" due to lack of HIV testing). It begs the question, and invalidates postultes 1 and 4. #3 is mostly based on, as you put it, non-experimental evidence, which isn't bad in itself except there aren't any statistical controls, either, making it unscientific as well.
>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>life
Many Muslims think jokes about Mohammed are worth cutting your head off.
Nothing is off limits in humor, or there is no humor.
And while it is possible to get HIV by other means, the main explosion of the disease in this country started with gays. Take that, all those who said gays never contributed anything to society!
You are right that the formal definition of AIDS leads to circular logic (HIV causes AIDS, AIDS is defined by HIV). The fact remains, however, that the evidence shows that HIV leads to a syndrome of severe immunocompromise - we can call it AIDS, or we can call it severe HIV-associated immunocompromise, but whatever we call it, it's something and it's real and the evidence would strongly suggest that it is caused by HIV. Such "invalidation" of postulates 1 and 4 based on the formal definition of AIDS is an issue of semantics, not of clinical realities.
Strep throat is defined as a tonsillopharyngitis caused by Group A Streptococcus. One could make the similar argument that this cannot be proved with Koch's postulates, and is therefore unscientific. Does that argument stand to reason? Perhaps. Is it useful? Only marginally.
As for postulate 3, I agree that the evidence is not exquisitely compelling. However, is it ethical to prove postulate 3? No, it is not; the third postulate thus remains unproven for many diseases. We rely on other types of data to support (not prove) postulate 3. "Statistical controls" would not help us here -- there are many other causes of severe immunodeficiency that can cause syndromes very similar/identical to AIDS, but the existence of such etiologies neither proves nor disproves causality. I can prove that there are non-strep infections which can cause symptoms indistinguishable from strep throat, but that doesn't have much bearing on the causality of Group A Strep for strep throat.
Logically, it is ultimately possible that HIV is but a confounded variable with the true cause of AIDS. This is the centerpiece of Peter Duesberg's argument for drug abuse as the cause of AIDS (an argument that is strongly contradicted by the available evidence). However, no one has yet identified such a factor that is supported by any evidence, experimental or not. The bulk of the non-experimental evidence surrounding HIV suggests a causal relationship. Unscientific? Perhaps, but this is the best data we have. The challenges inherent in proving anything in a biological context are an unfortunate reality of biomedical research.
Sidestepping the arguments regarding causality for a moment, I would like to point out that anti-retroviral therapy has been demonstrated to be effective in placebo-controlled trials toward delaying both opportunistic infections and, ultimately, death, in HIV+ patients. It may not be perfect science - but in biology and medicine, our knowledge is often incomplete and our ability to perform controlled experiments is poor. You do the best you can, but ultimately you have to take a pragmatic approach and see if things work as you hope they do. One can call it unscientific, but the thousands of patients who are alive due to anti-retroviral therapy are probably grateful for it nonetheless.
We found a cure! All you have to do is inject yourselves with lots of cash! Yipee!
Then put your money where your mouth is - infect yourself willingly with HIV and don't take any treatments for it.
Surely if it's harmless as cretins like Hogan say, then there's no reason for you not to do it and thus prove to the world that the HIV/AIDS connection is completely false. You would certainly win fame, prestige, riches beyond your wildest dreams for exposing it, right?
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
The Pink PC Police are gonna get me now! They'll make me watch Will and Grace reruns for 24 hours straight as punishment. But wouldn't that be considered torture?
Even my gay friends can laugh at gay jokes better than you can. Actually, they told me most of the ones I know.
Time to send your sacred cow to the slaughterhouse.
I'm an anonymous nobody with no medical or biological education and training whatsoever, you insensitive clod!
I've given the matter less thought than the length of this post would indicate
LOL, that cracked me up!
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
Shouldn't (1) include something like "and never found in abundance in organisms not suffering from the disease"
Absolutely not.
It's always possible, and in fact quite likely, that there will be portions of the population who can carry the infection without developing symptoms. Carriers of HIV+ who do not develop symptoms of AIDS are not unheard of, but then again carriers of flu viruses who do not develop the flu are fairly common.
"having immune deficiency" is too general. There are a specific set of diseases which are symptomatic of the way HIV+ attacks the immune system (specifically the reduction of CD4+ T cells.)
But aren't we all dying, day by day? Some of use are just dying more quickly and predictably than others.
Common sense is to not joke with people who can't take a joke
Anyone have a torrent for this? I'm getting wood just thinking about it.