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AIDS Vaccine Is Partially Successful
ifchairscouldtalk writes "A Phase III 'RV 144' study in Thailand succeeded in reducing HIV infection rate in trial with 31.2% effectiveness. The study was conducted by the Thailand Ministry of Public Health and used strains of HIV common in Thailand. It is not clear whether the vaccine, which combines AIDSVAX with Aventis Pasteur ALVAC-HIV canarypox vector, known as 'vCP1521,' would work against other strains in the United States, Africa or elsewhere. Strangely, the vaccine had no effect on levels of HIV in the blood of those who did become infected, providing 'one of the most important and intriguing findings' of the trial, according to Dr Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is one of the trial's sponsors."
I'm not normally a stickler for these, but AIDS is a syndrome, HIV is the virus that causes it. The vaccine can prevent you from acquiring HIV and thence from developing AIDS. It's not a cure, it's a preventative measure.
I was promised flying cars...Why are there no flying cars?
Cool! Hopefully by the time I become sexually active it will have improved much more!
You just got troll'd!
Col. Jerome H. Kim, a physician who is manager of the armyâ(TM)s H.I.V. vaccine program, said half the 16,402 volunteers were given six doses of two vaccines in 2006 and half were given placebos. They then got regular tests for the AIDS virus for three years. Of those who got placebos, 74 became infected, while only 51 of those who got the vaccines did.
Wait, wait, wait. Did they go through the random distribution of people who may get aids? Clearly they did not just infect people with aids afterwards. The only way I can think of them getting these rates is that when someone tested positive for aids who was not in the trial noted their previous partners, then that partner list was cross-referenced with the vaccinated.
Hm, I guess the other way would be if someone who had the vaccine was told by one of their partners that they were infected and that they should get themselves checked.
Regardless, there has to be a significant margin of error on their estimates thanks to AIDS reporting and such.
You should go teach the doctors and scientists what they are doing wrong.
...but their conclusions.
How in the hell could you ever do a controlled experiment like this on people if you dont control their exposure to the infection causing material? The only way you can determind improvements of real thing over placebo is if you intentionally expose the test subjects to the virus...which would be a death sentence.
Their results could mean that the group recieving the test vaccine came into contact with the virus 31.2% less.
1331461 is only semiprime *sigh* Alas - I am just short of 1337.
How is that news for nerds ?
None of us will ever get laid, so that's not stuff that matters...
</cliché>
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
While this is excellent news, and intriguing scientifically, an effectiveness of 31.8% is practically useless in vaccinating a population. Typically you need at least 70% of your population (varies based on virus) vaccinated before you start to see the effects of herd immunity. Even if they vaccinated everyone in Thailand, you wouldn't get this effect.
Furthermore, the low effectiveness is actually a liability; the end result could be mutations in the HIV virus that make it immune to the vaccine. This is part of the reason why the influenza vaccine has limited effectiveness - influenza, like HIV, has a tendency to mutate quickly. If a new strain comes along, like H1N1 for influenza, you're defenseless.
Finally, I think there's a problem with how the vaccine will be perceived. If the vaccine is only 30% effective, I think people will see that as being too risky to even get the shot. There's already (too much IMO) FUD out there against vaccines in general. If you think that you can get influenza from the flu vaccine, there's a strong aversion to taking the HIV vaccine. For a 30% chance at being immune, that's no good. If it were 100%, that would be a totally different story.
, let's hope that this discovery will really serve its purpose..maybe the next one would be a final cure... Samsung LED TV
The sample sizes were not 74 and 51. The sample size of people vaccinated was "more than 16,000 volunteers". 74 and 51 were just the number of people infected, which is still statistically significant. [to what confidence level, I do not know].
Formerly known as not successful.
I... don't recall the world ever being black and white. I'm pretty sure what you're doing is called "oversimplifying".
I am the lawn!
someone do some analysis on the statistics and tell us all something and get +5
Sure. It's Poisson statistics, so the standard deviation is the square root of the count.
placebo: 74 plus or minus 8.6
vaccine: 51 plus or minus 7.1
The statistical significance of the difference (23) is equal to the standard deviation of the sum (not the difference!) of the counts, so:
difference between placebo and vaccine:
23 (=31%) plus or minus 11
= (2.06 standard deviations)
Assuming they set their criteria for statistical significance at two standard deviations, then they are significant.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I have a new test for a vaccine that prevents car accidents! I'll inject 8,000 people with a placebo, and I'll inject my vaccine into another 8,000. There's a reasonably probability that the half with the "real" vaccine will have less car accidents, thus showing progress in my vaccine! TLDR: Vaccine trials are useless without infecting people.
CANNONBALL!
Fortunately, that gives the the researchers plenty of time...
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Only cures good AIDS, doesn't work on bad AIDS
They gave the vaccine to people who didn't have aids in two groups, and then looked at who got aids after 3 years.
It could just be that people on the placebo took more risks than the people who didn't which is why it is a statistical outlier.
This is the most ridiculously published study I've ever seen, but if they are looking for funding, I guess it's a good way to get it.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Can I partially use condoms in conjunction with the vaccine and be safe? My dad never talked about this during the birds and bees talk.
Why is it that on slashdot of all places that should be full of nerds we get idiots that don't grasp basic statistics and people that mod it up? As long as you got a proper control group it's simple to say "If we assume the true probability is the same, how unlikely is it that we get these results?" Of course there's something about the level of confidence - a 99% confidence means there's a 1% your observation is random fluctuations. But the whole "we reject math and logic because the numbers feel to small" sounds like the results of retarded anti-schooling.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
At least the article has some numbers so we can to the (approximated) maths ourselves. The numbers of infected for medicine/placebo are 51 and 74, respectively. The error of the difference is then sqrt(54+71) = 11 (poissonian statistics). The difference itself is 74-51 = 23, so we can conclude that 23 +/- 11 persons were saved from infection. That means that we're just two standard deviations (23/11) away from the null result. This will happen by coincidence 5% of the time. So if they'd done the study 20 times, you'd expect this outcome once. Now this study has only been done once, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear that 20 different AIDS medications have been tested over time, and so it's quite likely to see this outcome once. Conclusion: This warrants further study, but they really haven't proven much yet. In fact, if they were physicists and not physicians they would have proven nothing. Especially since they, by their own admission, cannot explain the result.
Didn't Magic Johnson originally find that money will actually cure your HIV? So, this really isn't new news is it?
Not at all. What this shows is that the vaccine likely works for some subset of the population. That doesn't mean it doesn't work at all. Viagra for example only works for about 60% of men but people don't go screaming that it doesn't work.
Bottom line here is that vaccine or no, you should still practice safe sex (afterall, HIV isn't the only bad disease lurking around out there). However, if this thing has a ~30% chance of making you immune to the disease with no other ill effects then it's certainly worth reducing your chances by that much.
Basically, to break it down, your chances of getting aids comes down to 3 factors (4 now with this in place):
a * b * c * d
Where
a = the chance that your partner is infected
b = the chance that you catch the disease during an encounter with an infected partner (having intercourse with an infected person doesn't guarantee infection)
c = the chance that your protection fails (only comes into play if you used protection - otherwise it's 100%)
d = the chance that your vaccine was ineffective (only comes into play if you actually got vaccinated - otherwise this is 100%)
Everything that is scientifically proven to reduce the final result, even if it doesn't go to 0% in the end, is a success in my opinion.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
It would be unethical to expose all participants to HIV. They did the next best thing.
There's nothing wrong with the basic idea of the study design. Of course, they may have fucked it up, but that's a different situation.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
But I thought AIDS was sent by God as a scourge of teh gheys. So God must hate the 68.8% it doesn't work for, then.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
How the heck do they find volunteers for this kind of thing? Does it go like this:
"Hey kid, let us inject you with 'weak' HIV virus concoctions and then treat you to the hooker of your choice. Oh, and here's some heroin to shoot yourself up with. Have a blast!"
Seriously though; who the heck would willingly subject themselves to any strain of HIV? A vaccine is designed to give you a mild form of the disease that you're trying to prevent. A "mild" case of AIDS doesn't sound much better than a full-blown case - and what about that tiny percentage which already has a compromised immune system and develops the full-blown infection? This can and does happen with vaccines.
AIDS is relatively easy to prevent. Don't be a slut, don't do drugs, etc. and the chances of contracting it are miniscule. The only drawback to that (abstinence) is being a good samaritan is scary - if someone is in a bad car accident and you're trained in first aid, do you help or don't you? Your conscience says yes, but your self-preservation instincts kick in and you think to yourself "I wonder if this person has HIV or hepatitis." Oh and another one: what if your dentist or doctor or tattoo artist or hairdresser or whoever is infected? Vaccines are good for those situations I suppose, but is it worth the risk of a vaccine giving you the full-blown disease?
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Their results could mean that the group recieving the test vaccine came into contact with the virus 31.2% less.
No, you don't need to control their exposure. You can study the infection rate for the general population, and provided that your study group isn't unusually different from the general population (say, by being all sexually active gay men), you can expect a similar infection rate over time.
yes, there are potentially statistical deviations that could occur, but the larger the sample group and the more test that occur, the less likely this is. Go take some stats classes if you are curious about the methodology, but if they did the trial correctly your suggested interpretation is very unlikely.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
if the infection rate would have been even lower had they just educated the participants about prevention... All of those infected were thrown to the wolves so to speak just to see what would happen.
we get idiots that don't grasp basic statistics...
Because not all of us have had statistics. I won't be taking my statistics class until next year and that's only because I'm going back to school to add to my degrees.
While I understand the basics of statistics and how they are generated, don't ask me to do any computations.
Then again, some people are simply beyond help when it comes to accepting facts or well established principles.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
The next best thing was to give a placebo such that the control group would be confident in their new-found immunity to HIV, at least as much as the experimental group. Otherwise the control would use more condoms because they're not on the experimental vaccine. This should have been controlled against a normal group with a similar profile as well, and another with a similar profile but specifically taken to safe sex practices.
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But the whole "we reject math and logic because the numbers feel to small" sounds like the results of retarded anti-schooling.
Welcome to America, here's your churro.
I may agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to face the consequences of saying it.
This is why I like IUD + pill + condom... babies are evil.
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I take it you haven't seen this ad.
http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/lax/878989144.html
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You forgot * e
e = the chance that you post on slashdot in which case e is zero
Didn't the article say that one group got a vaccine, and the other got a placebo?
"Col. Jerome H. Kim, a physician who is manager of the armyâ(TM)s H.I.V. vaccine program, said half the 16,402 volunteers were given six doses of two vaccines in 2006 and half were given placebos."
Oh yea, that's what it said.
I don't see anything wrong with the basic kind of study. As I said, they may have fucked it up somehow, such as fucking up the selection of the participants and grouping them.
And why would they want to control against additional groups? They're measuring one thing. How effective is the vaccine. Your proposal to control against other groups are actually separate studies. They can and should be run independently at first. I can totally understand them not wanting to add complexity to a study that already has more than 16,000 participants.
So, I still don't see any valid objection as to why this kind of study won't work or is flawed somehow. In fact, this basic type of study is done all the time.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Apparently you've never watched old movies. Seriously, color is a recent invention.
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
The highest-rising infected group is heterosexual women in their 20s.
Look it up.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
I have reviewed the other comments and agree that 30% is not much help and that it may encourage risky behavior from those who believe it to be a magic bullet.
Given all of that, I am still hopeful. We had a disease that until now we had made no significant inroads on controlling. Now we have something. We have a beta version or an alpha. Maybe some smart guy will come up with a beta 2 that covers 40%. Then 50%. Maybe in my kids lifetime this horrible disease will be gone... ...and I can start screwing total strangers with impunity again!
Apparently you've never watched old movies. Seriously, color is a recent invention.
If you mean color presume you mean discovery, and if you mean invention I presume you mean color TV. And I hope your world isn't your TV young man.
I... don't recall the world ever being black and white. I'm pretty sure what you're doing is called "oversimplifying".
I am the lawn!
The great thing about a vaccine, even if imperfect, is it also reduces the chance that your partner is infected (if the vaccine is widely deployed). Picture the graph of how a sexually transmitted disease potentially spreads, where each node is a person and each edge is a sexual encounter. Now make 30% of the nodes immune to the disease. That's enough to protect a large chunk of graph (much more than just the 30% who are immune).
This is why I like IUD + pill + condom... babies are evil.
I'm in a long term relationship. Same effect.
I used to think I was somewhat intelligent...and then I read your post... :(
The total working group for this test was around 16,000 people. Only 125 actually became infected with HIV during those 3 years. The infected portion shows about 1/3 more in the placebo group. So yes, the sample is statistically significant, and someone wasted a mod point.
Who is John Cabal?
Yeah.. I saw 'HIV vaccine partly successful' and thought, great, what the world really needs are more straight people and boy-girl relationships. Yuck... him sticking his thing in her thing... it's just not natural!
No, the world used to be black and white. I have video and photos that prove it.
Simply for additional study. Do safe practices actually DRASTICALLY increase your resistance? What about the control group "Selective with partners" that wants to "get to know you" and try to determine if you seem sane rather than just fucking nameless strangers??
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The existing battery of drugs is enough to put HIV into remission. Your immune system will remain healthy and the virus particles will essentially disappear. But it's somewhere inside you; if you stop taking those drugs, it eventually comes back although you may have to wait.
HIV has long been known to hide somewhere in the body after drugs have eliminated the actual virus particles. They found where recently; it integrates its sequence into the DNA of T-cells, and the promoter at the start of the viral sequence is capped by a repressor protein. Once it comes off its DNA binding site, viral proteins start getting transcribed again.
They actually developed a drug that can kick it off there and make your AIDS come back again.
Why is it that on slashdot of all places that should be full of nerds we get idiots that don't grasp basic statistics and people that mod it up? As long as you got a proper control group it's simple to say "If we assume the true probability is the same, how unlikely is it that we get these results?" Of course there's something about the level of confidence - a 99% confidence means there's a 1% your observation is random fluctuations. But the whole "we reject math and logic because the numbers feel to small" sounds like the results of retarded anti-schooling.
True, but I don't think it's anti-math, I think it is a deeply ingrained sense that anytime anyone breaks out statistics, its because they're using it to lie about something. I blame it on the overuse of them in overbearing advertising (4/5 doctors agree that the Happy Time Fun Company antibacterial whatever, made from all organic compounds, will kill 99.9% of bacteria*)
* (in microscopic fine print) Bacteria that was killed was either harmless bacteria or crazy moon bacteria you will never interact with. Harmful bacteria is unharmed by all Happy Time products. None of the above statements are evaluated by the FDA. Our product does nothing at best, and is harmful to you at worst.
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Basically, to break it down, your chances of getting aids comes down to 3 factors (4 now with this in place):
a * b * c * d
Where a = the chance that your partner is infected b = the chance that you catch the disease during an encounter with an infected partner (having intercourse with an infected person doesn't guarantee infection) c = the chance that your protection fails (only comes into play if you used protection - otherwise it's 100%) d = the chance that your vaccine was ineffective (only comes into play if you actually got vaccinated - otherwise this is 100%)
Everything that is scientifically proven to reduce the final result, even if it doesn't go to 0% in the end, is a success in my opinion.
This is the part that makes me question this study.
Specifically, by the factors quoted above:
a) How many of the 16,000 were actually exposed (or know they were exposed)?
b) Even if exposed, it doesn't always mean you catch it during that exposure.
c) How many were using condoms? Any of them that used condoms every time and never had a condom break, they aren't useful for this study.
d) Is untested if your sample doesn't adjust for all of the above and those who simply have not had sex in the time of the study.
And, if you ask people to expose themselves to HIV by not using protection and/or actively seeking exposure, what are the ethical ramifications, especially with regards to those in the control?
I put on my robe and wizard hat..
Agreed. They ought to start administering this to the whores.
You forgot the vasectomy.
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
Last Friday's 20/20 was about a some middle-age guy who bedded middle-age women almost every day and infected at least a dozen of them (proven in court by DNA analysis). He must of have had a very effective virus or technique, because infection usually doesnt happen in just a few times. He got 45 years for knowing recklessness. But this was less than two years of his exploits. There is suggestion it was going on for over 12 years and there are many other victims.
The point is that some demographics think they are "safe" because they arent connected with risky types, i.e. gays, druggies, promiscuous youth. But sex is something people lie the most about, and you can never be sure.
P.S. The show & court trial did examine the issue of whether there could be "victims" if there was consensual relations. That wasnt fully resolved in my mind.
This page and this page indicate that the study was double-blind. If it was, then I do not see how your worry is reasonable. If both groups were unaware of whether they received the treatment or not, then I do not see how one group that happened to be the control group would reliably act differently than the experimental group. Am I missing something? Or are you claiming that once people believe they have the vaccine, that they will have more unprotected sex and thus increase their risk of contracting HIV?
Every post I make begins with the assumption P=~P.
Because Slashdot houses people who are clever enough to poke obvious holes in research but either lack the mathematical skills, the energy or the disposition to determine whether their vague objection is meaningful? My personal theory has long been that tech folk are underused cognitively, so they do not gain an adequate "respect" for the difficulties inherent in other fields (this may also due to the type of personality that is attracted to tech-like work). Scan through any Slashdot thread on psychology and/or economics and you'll find droves of people who seem to think that those respective disciplines have overlooked some minor issue. The arrogance is helpful in the sense that you can see through the various falsehoods that are considered true in those disciplines, but it also can contribute to the type of sloppy thinking that you have a problem with.
Every post I make begins with the assumption P=~P.
Unfortunately, as the article notes, the sample groups may themselves be problematic. A previous study of another vaccine that was found to *increase* infection rates may not have been dangerous; they just neglected to control for circumcision and intravenous drug use. Given this study dates back to before the end of the previous study, their samples may be skewed the opposite direction. Circumcision has been found to reduce the risk of infection by 40-70%. IV drug use is insanely dangerous (I don't know the exact multiplier, but it is rather high). If the test group had a couple hundred extra circumcised individuals, or a dozen or so IV drug users, it could easily skew the results.
Of course, this is still overlooking another problem with the vaccine. It's not one injection, or even one plus a booster or two. It's a two vaccine regimen, with six injections of each component, for twelve total shots (they may eventually be combined, but that all depends on whether the components react with each other outside the body). And the duration of the protective effect is unknown, and likely short (since the vaccine doesn't seem to trigger the production of antibodies). Even if it was incredibly cheap, it's hard to get people to follow up for a second MMR shot, or keep up to date on their tetanus, both of which protect against diseases which are easier to catch without engaging in risky behavior. Can you imagine asking people to pay a few hundred dollars (a guess based on the cost of Gardasil), and visit the doctor half a dozen times to get such a relatively small benefit (reducing risk by about a third, with only two years of testing)?
Even if we assume the samples are good, this is only a first step, and a very short one at that.
In response to the PP: I suspect the confidence level is 95%. Most published studies require that level of precision, and no one likes to hamstring themselves by demanding greater confidence; after all, they spent a lot of money and rejecting the drug would waste it. Of course, if you've ever played D&D, you know how often you get fumbles or critical successes. 95% means the odds of it being insignificant could be as high as the odds of fumbling a roll.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
that's all well and good, but if you don't understand statistics, you probably shouldn't be complaining about the statistics in a study that is undergoing peer review.
I'm not saying you're complaining about the study, I just don't think the excuse you presented holds water.
Using the Binomial Distribution [stattrek.com]
Probability of success on a single trial = 0.5
Number of trials = 125 (74+51)
Number of successes (x) = 74
Cumulative Probability: P(X is greater or equal to 74) = 0.02433
The probability that the vaccine did not have any effect is 2.4%
I have developed my own vaccine to HIV!
Simply subscribing to Slashdot makes you statistically 50% less susceptible to HIV!
I will take my 1 million dollar award in ten 100,000 dollar bills.
Seriously the study needs to be repeated and verified before anyone gets too excited.
It is not surprising that this was developed in Thailand due to the large sex trade there. Which makes me wonder about the demographic of the test subjects. Because of the large number of sex trade workers, any significant number in one group or the other will taint the results. If they were ALL sex trade workers that would be something different, however the article does not examine that detail. It could be that one group just happened to get 30% more sex trade workers than the other.
Also Slashdot I hate you and your stupid editor (not the person, the thing I am trying to type in).
16,402 volunteers ...is that I can travel to Thailand and have sex with random people for 3 years, and I only have a 0.9% chance of getting HIV?
2006
74 Infected Placebo
51 Infected Vaccine
This isn't so much a medical study as it is a tourism promotion aimed at a target audience. Supply and Demand!
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that's all well and good, but if you don't understand statistics, you probably shouldn't be complaining about the statistics in a study that is undergoing peer review.
I'm not saying you're complaining about the study, I just don't think the excuse you presented holds water.
that's all well and good, but if you don't understand how the government/economy works, you shouldn't be complaining about the president when there is a recession?
People complain for the sake of complaining, and usually those who complain the loudest know the least about what they're complaining about. I cover an escalation spot on a technical helldesk, and I've heard people bitch about some of the biggest non-issues I've ever heard. Sometimes their bitch was about things they were entirely wrong about. It's called misplaced aggression. People have to bitch at everything they can because it's illegal to just go out and kill the person who pissed you off to begin with.
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how is it that so few people on slashdot understand the concept of controlled trials.
This trial had a control group - if the control group is infected at a rate that is statistically significantly higher than the test group, the vaccine is at least partially effective with a certain confidence interval.
Use of condoms, exposure rate, etc don't matter if you randomly select your groups and properly blind them.
Heh. Look who posted this story. CmdrTaco. I don't think that is a coincidence, do you?
And why the shitting crikey are you using the binomial distribution? HIV infection is a rare event with numerous chances to happen, so it will be well modelled by a Poisson distribution.
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Dr. Fauci said that scientists would seldom consider licensing a vaccine less than 70 or 80 percent effective, but he added,"If you have a product that's even a little bit protective, you want to look at the blood samples and figure out what particular response was effective and direct research from there."
They don't expect to be selling this as is - they know it's not good enough. Instead, they're going to use the results to further research until they can produce a better, practical vaccine.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
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Don't be too concerned, i think a Humanities undergrad just happened to get the first post this time, that's all.
Of course there's something about the level of confidence - a 99% confidence means there's a 1% your observation is random fluctuations.
Explanations of confidence intervals are one of the most frequently mistaken pieces of stats comments. The correct explanation goes something like this: If your results are significant at the 5% level, then that means that if there was no difference between the two groups, you would observe results at least this unlikely less than 5% of the time by random chance. We cannot say that the hypothesis (the vaccine works) is 95% likely to be true; it either is or isn't. What we can say is how *unlikely* we would be to observe this result purely by luck, in the absence of any actual difference.
You say "just fucking nameless strangers" like it is a bad thing. :)
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
Helping queer's and druggy's.
Instead of spreading hate- why not work on your English? There are no apostrophes in the plural form of "queers" or "druggies". Furthermore, "druggie" is not spelled "druggy".
I would but since I'm a nerd and nerds don't have sex.....
Well let's just say I'm not concerned about AIDS. Now obesity from eating too many potato chips - THERE'S something to worry about. Isn't it about time someone developed a pill to absorb fat from your food, and carry it out the opposite end? Something like olestra but less icky.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Tell that to a rape victim.
Finally, I think there's a problem with how the vaccine will be perceived. If the vaccine is only 30% effective, I think people will see that as being too risky to even get the shot.
I'd be willing to bet you'd also get a lot of people who would get the vaccine, and thus engage in more risky behavior, figuring they've got a 1-in-3 shot "if I happen to have sex with someone who has HIV, and...." You'll also get people saying to their partners "hey, don't worry, I got the vaccine"...whether they did or not.
It'll be even worse if the vaccine becomes 100% effective; say hello to skyrocketing rates of other STD's. At least a good chunk of the other ones are curable. HIV is the big nuclear scare for safe sex; without it, everyone's gonna get a bit less careful.
Please help metamoderate.
I'm going to guess that computer people are over-represented here, and it's been my experience that IT people and programmers are largely self-taught, which means that while they can be quite intelligent in a lot of different areas, they tend to have really glaring gaps in their understanding of things, and statistics is one of the really common ones.
I can't tell you how many arguments I've had with people who couldn't grasp really basic things about statistics only to have them argue "I know what I'm talking about because I'm a programmer" (argument from authority fallacy).
I think it's because computer nerds expect things to be true or false without all the messiness of statistics.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Scan through any Slashdot thread on psychology and/or economics and you'll find droves of people who seem to think that those respective disciplines have overlooked some minor issue
Given the track record of the fields of psychology and economics, it's certain that those respective disciplines have overlooked some major issues.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I seem to recall shades of gray in old movies.
...rather than just fucking nameless strangers??
Phew! I'm safe. All the strangers I've done the horizontal mambo with had names. I can't tell you what they were, but I know for certain that they had names.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
This doesn't always work so well in theory, but if you have 16,000 people split into two groups, then you have a pretty low probability of the results being skewed just by chance (that is what confidence interval means by the way).
Of course, that's only worthwhile if the study sample wasn't flawed from the get go. If it was, they'll be devoting resources to research that, by definition, won't produce useful results.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
Yep, it didn't come out until the 50's and it was pretty grainy color for a while.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
If you're going to quote stats, get it right.
The #1 growing AIDS population is BLACK and HISPANIC woman in their 20's. No, I'm not a racist, but these are the facts you carefully omitted.
I wasn't aware that "BLACK and HISPANIC" was a sexual orientation. Thanks for the clarification.
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
I wasn't aware that 20's was a sexual orientation either.
"Druggie" is not a word, so I am not certain how you are correcting its spelling.
Hey! I was a humanities undergrad (philosophy), and had to bathe daily in statistics and scientific methodology. I'm not saying all humanities undergrads were in the same boat, but you still made a false generalization. Not all humanities people are rank morons, or completely uninformed. I think the morons are pretty well uniformly distributed throughout ALL disciplines.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
Except for the trooleans. (a 3 state 1/0/-1 or true/false/!@#$? variable)
P.S. Welcome to the 32bit Windows API. Welcome to hell.
'Or are you claiming that once people believe they have the vaccine, that they will have more unprotected sex and thus increase their risk of contracting HIV?'
Of course they would. Perhaps you enjoy having sex with a piece of rubber but some of us prefer actual contact. Eliminating STD's and circumcision are two of the greatest causes known to man.
Replace "IV Drug use" with "sharing needles" and I would agree with your point on this issue. The problem with the language is that it discriminates against drug use. Drug use does not spread HIV, reducing need availability does.
I would agree that the study should concentrate on uncircumcised men since ideally we shouldn't have to hack off the male genitals.
"protect against diseases which are easier to catch without engaging in risky behavior. Can you imagine asking people to pay a few hundred dollars (a guess based on the cost of Gardasil), and visit the doctor half a dozen times to get such a relatively small benefit (reducing risk by about a third, with only two years of testing)?"
You believe that eliminating the risk from anonymous sex would be a small benefit? The flaw in your thought is that people actively avoid being stabbed by rusty nails. Nobody wants to have to avoid or restrict sex. Ideally we could safely couple with as many partners as we could manage. An aids vaccine wouldn't get us there but an aids vaccine coupled with a male version of the pill would certainly help.
According to numerous online sources, raw numbers are:
51 out of 8187 found infected in the vaccinated group;
74 out of 8198 found infected in the control group.
The most basic course of statistics tells how to proceed from here: test if the null hypothesis (vaccine has no effect) remains plausible despite this evidence. Conditions are ideal for the chi-squared test.
We get Observed values 51, 74, 8147, 8123; Expected values 62.504, 62.496, 8135.5, 8134.5; then sum((O-E)^2/E) = 4.267, with two degrees of freedom.
Conclusion: the null hypohesis is rejected with only 88% confidence level.
This is not enough to confortably say that the vaccine has any benefit. Odds of the contrary are about 1/17.
This is much less reason to trust that the vaccine reduce infection rate by 31.1%, as reported in some press articles. Odds are 1/2 that it is less efficient than this.
Francois Grieu
Due to ethical reasons, they couldn't do a proper study by administering the vaccine and then trying to infect people with HIV, and observing the results. Instead they sort of turned people loose into the wild, and an unknown number of those were actually exposed to the HIV virus in each group. Perhaps the incidence of HIV exposure is a random process, perhaps not. There could be unseen biases between the two groups which could account for the 10 or so person difference in infection rates. The vaccine might actually be 0% effective.
Lazy. I just tear the door off a microwave oven, set to popcorn, and stand in front of it with it at the same level as my man bits.
>>We cannot say that the hypothesis (the vaccine works) is 95% likely to be true; it either is or isn't. What we can say is how *unlikely* we would be to observe this result purely by luck, in the absence of any actual difference.
Well, it depends if you subscribe to the Bayesian model of statistical truth or not. This is actually a fairly significant philosophical point.
Because not all of us have had statistics. I won't be taking my statistics class until next year and that's only because I'm going back to school to add to my degrees.
It's such a shame that it's impossible to learn things without taking a class on them. If only someone would collect knowledge in a form that is accessible to the general public. Maybe they could print it onto paper pages, bind them together, and store them in large, public buildings. Or possibly they could use these newfangled 'computer' things. I hear they can be networked together to make access to information easy...
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to people who are at a high risk of becoming infected with HIV then it would be worth getting a vaccine. the problem is this vaccine may not do anything for people in the US because the strains common to Thailand could be very different. also, IV drug use is only dangerous, in the sense of risking contracting HIV or hep c, if the person injecting is sharing needles with someone else.
The efficiency is not based on the total test population anway. Just imagine if there was 1 people infected in the drug group and 2 in the control group. Would you say the vaccine has 50% efficiency ?
I might be wrong but 16000 is the population, 125 is the sample size. If that's correct, that mean a 8.7% error margin assuming the test process was absolutely perfect in perfectly balanced groups. While a 30% reduced infection rate looks outside of the range and have a decent chance to be a real observation, they should not brag about it too much yet, it's way bellow the confidence you must have before calling it a scientific proof.
Add to that the fact that :
- the "no partial antibody response" and it's workaround theory looks quirky (even more than internet explorer 5 in quirks mode)
- something could have gone wrong in the test process
- if you do 10 studies more or less like this, it's very likely that 1 of them get lucky false positive with that kind of large error margin or false positive due to wrong test process
There's still a chance that duke nukem forever might be released before this HIV vaccine and if i was forced to bet my money one of them I would still pick that dude nukem forever as the race winer.
I will let the real math guy give their real formula and results, but as far as I'm concerned i have already set my computer clock to April 1 to be consistent with the article.
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Stephane
Merriam-Webster disagrees with you.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Well, several dictionaries do not agree with you.
Here is the entry from dictionary.com -- note that according to the Random House entry, "druggy" is an acceptable alternate spelling, contrary to the GP. The Merriam-Webster entry also indicates "druggy" as a variant spelling.
Here is the entry from the Oxford English Dictionary, widely considered to be authoritative on all dialects of the English language.
So, the GP may have been wrong for taking you (or whoever) to task for the "druggy" spelling, but you are most certainly wrong that it is not a word. Next time, do a little research. A slang term that has entered common use is still a word, regardless of its origins.
Also, the GP was very much right for calling out the hate speech for what it was.
Instead of creating a vaccine, Doctors could somehow manipulate the CCR-5 genetic mutation? The University of Pennsylvania is attempting to modify CCR-5 Genetic mutation. I don't know what the proper medical speak would sound like as I am NOT a medical professional. Rather,
I'm and individual trying to understand this from a researcher's perspective. It sounds promising, but who knows if or how it might work. Leave that to those more intelligent than us. The Wall Street
Journal had an article about a bone marrow transplant that functionally cured HIV/AIDS by seeking a donor that had a natural occurence of the CCR5 coreceptor mutation.
The WSJ called this a cure however, with only one known person to have this procedure. The first you instance/mention of this possibility I could find was here.
One has to wonder if this could be a real cure/treatment from HIV/AIDS, but we'll never know until a significant amount of testing/research has been done to prove this.
If you subscribe to that model, you still can't say that the vaccine is 95% likely to work; you need a prior estimate for the likelihood the vaccine works, which you can then modify based on the results of the study.
Circumcision has been found to reduce the risk of infection by 40-70%.
This is complete nonsense and nobody takes it seriously. The 'studies' in Africa were methodologically flawed and they contradict further statistical studies from developed countries like New Zealand. There was even a recent study in South Africa---a mathematical model---that showed circumcision to be almost useless (it was 20x more effective and much less invasive to promote condoms, testing, and treatment), and that's in a region where 20% of the population has HIV.
Quit spreading FUD.
However, if this thing has a ~30% chance of making you immune to the disease with no other ill effects then it's certainly worth reducing your chances by that much.
Context matters; you have to try pretty hard to get infected by HIV in countries like the U.S. and the U.S. has an HIV incidence rate that is 3.5x higher than the next most developed nation.
Condoms and safe sex are the only useful tools until there is a vaccine that is quite a bit more effective (and no, HIV prevention is the stupidest justification for circumcision to date, particularly because it's nonsense).
Sure, I'll tell that to a rape victim: all five or six that got HIV that way out of the millions who got it some other way.
And sure, my comment may not have been PC, but read the facts! Of the people who would be helped by a vaccine (i.e. not fetuses or infants), the second most common way to get it is from anal. Even unprotected penis-to-vagina sex still has a low risk, which casts doubt on the whole rape thing.
Seriously, refraining from engaging in a type of sex that's disgusting, unhealthy, and painful anyway is a pretty cheap way to protect yourself. If you're not willing to do that, um, *why* again, are we spending billions to protect you? Sheesh. I know of a billion people more deserving of that money than individuals (NOT NECESSARILY GAY) who just *have to have to have to* have one kind of sex without consequences. Ya know?
It's not a pleasant fact, but the truth is like that.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
From your own link:
"The Poisson distribution can be derived as a limiting case to the binomial distribution as the number of trials goes to infinity and the expected number of successes remains fixed."
"In several of the above examples---for example, the number of mutations in a given sequence of DNA---the events being counted are actually the outcomes of discrete trials, and would more precisely be modelled using the binomial distribution."
However this was not what I was doing. Notice that I use 125 trials and not 16402 or 8201. Given 125 infected people and 50% success on a single trial. What is the probability that 74 or more will be in the placebo group?
Now there's a vaccine for the results of your terrible perversion! And the entire Castro district and the Apple campus shouted with glee!
What do you mean? Don't chicks dig people who design cranes? You could always use that as a pickup line or something...
Yes... and no. Nowadays you have to really trust someone to go unprotected. The stuff you can catch is bad enough you might as well catch fire.
Ahh, I remember the days when that wasn't the case...
"Yes... and no. Nowadays you have to really trust someone to go unprotected. The stuff you can catch is bad enough you might as well catch fire."
Yeah.... to quote myself in the post you replied to.
"Eliminating STD's and circumcision are two of the greatest causes known to man."
So I guess... we agree?
Circumcision is the greatest cause known to man? What? I mean besides that your penis doesn't smell like cheese, so she doesn't complain and refuse to suck it....
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I am quite confident that both disciplines have gaping holes in their respective theoretical frameworks. I do not see how this entails that an amateur with little to no experience in the field ought to be taken remotely seriously.
Every post I make begins with the assumption P=~P.
Condoms and safe sex are the only useful tools until there is a vaccine that is quite a bit more effective
That would only be true if condoms and this vaccine were mutually exclusive. Sure a condom does a lot more to reduce your chances, but you don't have to choose one or the other. Condoms can and do fail. Having yet another chance to dodge that bullet when they do doesn't hurt a thing.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Isn't that what alli does?
And sure, my comment may not have been PC
I never said anything about that. I said it was inaccurate (which was a bit of an understatement, I admit). You either have no clue about the issue or are a troll. I suspect the latter but in case you are just uninformed, I'll do my best...
but read the facts! Of the people who would be helped by a vaccine (i.e. not fetuses or infants), the second most common way to get it is from anal. Even unprotected penis-to-vagina sex still has a low risk, which casts doubt on the whole rape thing.
You are so grossly misinterpreting the statistics presented that I don't even know where to start!
First of all, those estimations (!) don't refer to the amount of HIV transmitted (!!). They refer to the risk of transmitting HIV per act. With sex, all of those refer to unprotected (!!!) sex.
They don't say "Anal is second most common way for transmitting HIV" they say "Receptive, unprotected anal sex has the second highest risk of infection per act".
So if we assume that 95% of sex is oral or vaginal and 5% is anal, amount of HIV transmissions from those other sources exceed amount of transmissions from anal by far.
And remember that this is all about unprotected sex. Anal usually is either between gay men or a man and a woman who have been together for a while already. In the first group HIV awareness is certainly higher than anywhere else and in the second group... If the couple has had unprotected sex for a while, the virus probably has already been transmitted.
In addition, interest to use a rubber is much higher with anal sex than with oral sex for example (for obvious reasons), regardless of your demographic.
So no, anal sex certainly isn't the second most common way of transmitting HIV. The statistics don't even imply that. If you read them like that, 90% of all HIV infections would be from blood transfers? Did that not seem odd to you?
Seriously, refraining from engaging in a type of sex that's disgusting,
Are you even TRYING not to sound like a religious nutjob? What you find disgusting and what other people find disgusting don't (and shouldn't) always match 100%. For certain (rather large) demographics anal sex is the only way to have sex. (And if you say "Oral is just as fine! It has all the feeling, atmosphere, etc. that normal sex has!" you are being ridiculous)
unhealthy,
Uh. List of enjoyable things that are unhealthy is pretty long. Unhealthy foods, sitting in front of a computer...
and painful anyway
I take it you have never had anal sex with a partner who knows what he is doing? No? Don't try to use that argument then.
is a pretty cheap way to protect yourself. If you're not willing to do that, um, *why* again, are we spending billions to protect you? Sheesh.
This just in: Isolating yourself away from civilization is pretty cheap way that completely protects you from most of the diseases! Um... *Why* again are we spending billions to protect people? I try to be as polite as I can but it is very difficult here...
I know of a billion people more deserving of that money than individuals (NOT NECESSARILY GAY) who just *have to have to have to* have one kind of sex without consequences. Ya know?
It's not a pleasant fact, but the truth is like that.
There was not a single trace of truth in your post.
If the point was "It is possible to avoid HIV by responsible behavior", yeah, it is to some extent. You can use a condom in short affairs. That would solve a lot of problems in the western countries. But no behavior protects you if your long time partner is not faithful to you. And what if you live in an African country where HIV is very common?
Where are you getting 50% from?
Slashdot: news for Apple. Stuff that Apple.
You do know that what is cut off is for a man what a clit is for a woman right? It cuts off most of your nerves leaving you will only a tiny piece of what you are supposed to have. It never grows back, you are desensitized for life.
I think you will also find that circumcision is not a substitute for a shower.
I think part of the reason people want fat foods is because of how the foods make them feel, not just because of how the foods taste.
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It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.