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AIDS Vaccine Breakthrough
Doc Ruby writes "Scientists at Johns Hopkins University in MD, USA announced they've disrupted the means by which HIV stops the immune system from attacking it. From the article: 'Scientists say they have found a way to disarm the AIDS virus in research that could lead to a vaccine. Researchers have discovered that if they eliminate a cholesterol membrane surrounding the virus, HIV cannot disrupt communication among disease-fighting cells and the immune system returns to normal. [...] "By stealing cholesterol from the envelope of the virus, we can neutralize the subversion," said Graham. "We've broken the code; we can shut down the type of interference that HIV is having on the immune system."'"
With the recent deluge of articles on curing aids, cancer and even the common cold, is the future finally here? Are we going Deus Ex in a few years now?
Scientists say
traditional indication of hype
could lead
Oh its just hype after all.
Oh well... I'd like a /. story about how its real easy to have a working nuclear fusion reactor. All you need is to build a reactor, and then turn it on. No big deal, everyone be happy now.
This is not a story about vaccine trials, just a "wouldn't it be great if ..."
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
This isn't anything of the sort. It's laboratory discovery of potentially immense importance that could lead to a vaccine, but right now that's all; it hasn't been tested in animals.
captcha: worded.
the cure for AIDS, coming at you faster than the speed of light!
Given all the research being put into AIDS and cancer, the ever growing understanding on how viruses and the body works, and the increasing human ability to manipulate things on a nanoscale I was beginning to wonder what was taking so long.
Heck, once AIDS is solved, cancer should be next, and I hope some kind of universal anti-viral agent that boosts the immune system's effectiveness ten fold eventually comes. Something that can clean up plaque from blood vessels would be nice too.
Assuming that is true, I suspect that reform of immigration is a slightly more humane option than the equivalent of letting letting the homeless die each winter to reduce the number of beggars one must pass when wandering around the city.
I dont understand why the progress for aids research keeps being posted. They already found an antibody that will eliminate 90% of aids virus's. It is in Phase 1 Human Trials right now. Everything regarding aids research is old news.
Would the patient remain HIV+, even if a vaccine is preventing the virus from attacking it's host? Can the virus still be transferred to others?
The article hints at a way to attack the virus in the lab. There is absolutely no attempt yet to do the same in a human body. Can it be done safely? While the article says the cholestrerol membrane is not the same as the one that occurs in things related to coronary disease, is it maybe in use somewhere else? Wouldn't be much point in an AIDS vacine that causes you to fall apart in a puddle.
But the cure for AIDS has been here for a long time. How many people do you know with AIDS? I am not just making another joke about slashdotters not having sex, which isn't funny at all damn you!, but am serious. AIDS was this terrible nightmare from a by gone era when some people who made a lot of noise in the media had unprotected sex with everyone else in the group.
When people stopped doing that, AIDS practically disappeared to the point that young people again think it is safe to have unprotected sex with anyone.
The cure is latex, it works, it has been tried and tested. Not science, or as you put it, the futures fault you refuse to take your medicine.
It has always struck me as odd that it tooks AIDS to get people to start using condoms. Like the other diseases out there are not highly dangerous. This story itself is more likely to kill more people before it can start to cure as people think, "Oh there is a cure, we can fuck around again with no condom". This was the result of all the previous aids blocker stories were people interpreted it as a cure and so didn't care anymore.
Odd stuff, just because we got cure for food poisoning doesn't mean people started eating rotten food on purpose.
As for Africa, the aids epidemic is a symthom not the disease itself. Remove aids and the causes for mass infections remain.
Good news that there is a potential new avenue to create a medicine BUT it not yet here and the underlying problems have not been tackled. Humanity is still its old self.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Look at it another way... A huge number of African prostitute immigrants... Cheap, efficient and no more risk...
I'm off to the whorehouses!
Abstinence. Don't be tempted by sex unless you are 100% absolutely sure. I would suggest waiting until marriage.
The USA has an AIDS epidemic?
Emigration wouldn't solve anything, and the only reason to bring it up is... that's right: racist trolling.
What the population-booming countries of Africa need to solve that problem is 1) economic development and improved health care (so that there will be less "need" for a couple to over-reproduce) combined with 2) education and availability of effective birth control (so that they can follow through on the option to have fewer children).
(Furthermore, AIDS is a rather ineffective method of population control. Yes, it has a terrible death toll in much of Africa, but it's not keeping the population from growing, and a vaccine would have little impact on that.)
We won't see or hear about these breakthroughs again because there won't be any "profitable" method of distribution.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_HIV/AIDS_adult_prevalence_rate
Can't understand how anybody can post snarky troll crap at all.
Did you know there are over 30 million people with HIV and 1 million are in the U.S., and it's apparently accelerating maybe?
These researchers probably deserve the nobel and the medal of honor. Here's hoping that something amazing comes out of this.
Of course the tangent everyone will want to know about is this cholesterol film around the virus they are disrupting.. and a naive question about whether there is something simple that can be done to reduce this cholesterol and weaken the virus' immune disruption activity, before waiting years for the real thing.
with big pharma out of town, we can get back to out incredible orgies!
seriously, just strip the cover and it won't work? don't tell me they didn't try that 25 years ago.
I say several times UNPROTECTED sex. I mention latex explicitly. Was I being that subtle in referring to condoms?
And the underlying cause in Africa is not sex, it is rape. Mass rape. It is an cultural attitude to women that is getting ever more brutal.
Read a little about conditions in for instance South Africa before you go all indignant.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I thought this was going to be another one of those "wow we have a cure for HIV but xyz" type of articles, but there is so much more to it than that.
The coolest part about this breakthrough is that it was directly generated by people playing the game "fold it". The game (which I've played in the past) involves turning various little nobules on molecules in order to try to match them up to certain shapes. It's fun and mindless, I had *no idea* that the results were actually being used by scientists working on important problems.
This is truly crowdsourcing at it's best - check out the first page of the scientific paper for more details, after that it gets pretty bio-nerdy:
http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/zoran/NSMBfoldit-2011.pdf
I remember driving through the hazardous materials area in a tug once. I saw a big red vat with skull and crossbones labelled "HIV" in big letters. Fastest U-turn I've ever done.
"Africa is both the epicenter for the disease, and is a poverty-stricken continent where people need to have families, and relatively large ones at that, in order to be taken care of in their old age. These features are sufficient to explain the sustained high infection rate without resorting to the racist twaddle you're apparently peddling. "
Oh boy, you're so full of bullshit.
"Medical experts have shown a clear association between HIV exposure and coerced sex. Wives who suffer violence if they request condom use or faithfulness are at higher risk of AIDS than unmarried women and girls. That is why defeating the AIDS pandemic requires a second radical proposition: that African women and girls have the right to protection under their own countries' laws.
Why is this concept radical? Because public justice systems in many AIDS-burdened countries are broken or virtually inaccessible to poor girls and women. Rape and beatings are simply the norm, and deterrence and accountability for these crimes in Africa is as rare as AIDS drugs used to be."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/13/AR2006081300716.html
"Rape, including child rape, is increasing at shocking rates in South Africa. Sexual violence against children, including the raping of infants, has increased 400% over the past decade (Dempster, 2002). According to a report by BBC news, a female born in South Africa has a greater chance of being raped in her lifetime than learning how to read (Dempster, 2002). When South Africa became a democracy in 1994, there were already 18,801 cases of rape per year, but by 2001 there were 24,892 (Dempster, 2002). Numbers vary by different institutions, but are nevertheless extremely troubling. The Institute of Race Relations found that more than 52,000 rapes were reported in 2000, and 40% of the victims were under age 18 (du Venage, 2002). The University of South Africa reports that 1 million women and children are raped there each year (South Africa: Focus on the Virgin Myth, 2002)."
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/444213
http://www.scienceinafrica.co.za/2002/april/virgin.htm
Also, big families don't cause rape, you can't catch an infection from a clean partner no matter how many times you have sex.
These comments betray a shocking lack of understanding for the reality of AIDS in the developing world. Family units are being wiped out by AIDS, in countries where people don't even understand that it can be transmitted by blood. "Just use a condom and it's no big deal, we don't even really need a cure" is a stupid attitude for America but is downright heartless when you consider the situation in a lot of Africa.
Kudos to the researchers - a step forward in a test tube is still a step forward.
Don't worry those truly worthy of the Darwin Award will think any vaccine is a CIA plot to infect them with HIV or cause autism or some silly shit like that. Hell we develop a vaccine for cervical cancer caused by HPV, and people refuse to give it to their kids because of some idea that it encourages premarital sexual activity. While the potential of a HIV vaccine is exciting, we still have measles, rubella, Diptheria and pertussis , so it's unlikely that a HIV vaccine will eliminate HIV.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
I, for one, hope they're right & can see it through, because I don't know about the rest of you guys, but... it's about time this happened so we can all live better lives & hopefully longer lives for it, free of the fear of contracting this killer... Again - let's hope these guys can follow through on this, minus ANY "I am Legend" type side-effects, & to cure this bogus plague once & for all.
APK
P.S.=> AIDS is damned ironic, because the very thing that creates life can kill you because of it... time to get rid of this particular irony I say!
... apk
I thought we already had a cure for AIDS: Injecting $100 bills directly into the blood stream...
Yep. Quarantine or similar approaches (condoms etc) are actually a pretty good way of dealing with contagious diseases in the macroscale.
;) ).
After a while the disease either dies out or evolves to be less harmful.
Nowadays with the technology we have, many people or communities can remain productive and live not too terrible lives while under quarantine (heck some WoW players wouldn't even notice the difference
If everyone with just a sniffle worked from home and avoided contact with others, the common cold and flu would have to evolve to become near unnoticeable.
The same people who pay for every other goddamn forsaken cesspool in the world - the American Taxpayer.
The current situation is that you end up with migrants coming who have HIV...
Over population is already a serious problem in some places, and it only fuels the tyranny and corruption... When you have an unsustainable level of population growth causing a shortage of food, people will become increasingly desperate to acquire food by whatever means necessary. They need to curb population growth, not through AIDS but through education and contraception (condoms would also help to reduce the spread of AIDS). Once the population is at a level whereby there are sufficient resources to feed everyone, these countries will be in a far better position to stabilise themselves.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
"This AIDS thing's not working." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShTjhhYN04Y
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
If you would like to read the article for yourself [you will need to have a very in-depth knowledge of cellular biology and immunobiology], here is the source:
Over-activation of plasmacytoid dendritic cell inhibits anti-viral T-cell responses: a model for HIV immunopathogenesis
Blood, 2011
* Adriano Boasso,
* Caroline M Royle,
* Spyridon Doumazos,
* Veronica N Aquino,
* Mara Biasin,
* Luca Piacentini,
* Barbara Tavano,
* Dietmar Fuchs,
* Francesco Mazzotta,
* Sergio Lo Caputo,
* Gene M Shearer,
* Mario Clerici,
* and David R Graham
Sept 19, 2011 print edition
Being from South Africa and having worked in health care, I can confidently tell you that the only people who think dumbass shit like "vaccines are a government plot" are "educated" people from first world countries.
I hate printers.
Thanks, different Anonymous Coward. Saved me some typing.
How is it that AIDS and Africa are mentioned together and somehow nobody has yet to inject (pun intended) "Racism!"?
Don't you "Honi Soit Que Mal Y Pense" me!
They also tend to kill the host. This is why you hear about so many great cancer and disease cures, but never see them rolled out to the public.
I guess, technically, dead means you are no longer sick.
This fellow won't get anywhere in the entertainment sector of the economy for certain. He won't get a job anywhere that has gays in control or can extort through media malattention, boycotts, and/or violence. What the Mauve Hand wants, the Mauve Hand gets!
This is encouraging. This is an approach that's different from most of what's been tried. Also, it works on a feature that the virus has to have. If the virus evolves to not have a cholesterol coating, regular immune system responses will dispose of it. Most of the previous vaccines latched onto some non-critical part of the molecule and, as a result, were specific to some strains of the virus.
It's a long way from a vaccine, though.
"Most people want leaders that act as a substitute for their own super-egos, which lead them personally."
Interesting thought, but it ignores the acceleration of addictiveness coming from technology and marketing...
http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Are they ever worried that your medicine might contain bad juju?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7813418.stm
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Treatment or Cure, a vaccine suggest a cure, but where is the corporate-welfare in a cure?
I suspect we will get another lifelong profitable treatment, rather then the miracle life saving cure.
I am old enough to remember the cures vaccines polio, whooping cough, measles ..., what good government programs did for "The People", but cures are rare today in the age of scary life threatening treatments.
Look at how many politicians today speak against the HPV vaccine, which IMO is the same as saying more cancer care treatments later in live would be better. To frequently the government works for the corporate-welfare state, not the good of "The People." Even our public education systems are designed and miserly funded for supporting the US corporate-welfare state. I believe public schools can be as good as private schools, but politicians convince a large portion of the poorly educated public that education is broke and too hard to fix.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
You suffer from delusions of grandeur. The USA most famously is about the meanest country in the world, after only Italy. Most of what is called "foreign aid" is actually military aid particularly to Israel. That's not done out of charity, that's done in order to further your interests.
The people who end up paying to sort out the problems in the world are mostly Europeans and we look forward to the day the "American Taxpayer" starts paying their share.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
What's the link between SVN and TFA?
She also claimed that device could cure cancer... until she died of cancer.
Yes, AIDS is a Syndrome caused by HIV which is a Virus. Your being a pedant served no purpose other than making an ass of yourself. There is no lazy journalism going on here.
Everyone keeps forgetting Rule #1 of Pharmacology.
A Patient cured is a Customer lost.
It's a truism that almost all parents tell their kids not to have sex before marriage.
And most of them failed to heed this advice. Proof: Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) is caught by approx. 50% of the sexually active U.S. population at some point in their lives. If significant number people actually practiced lifetime monogamy, it wouldn't be so common.
In the US we're pretty good at getting our kids to school, getting them educated is still hit or miss.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
This sounds more like it would work at any time, making it not a vaccine, but a cure; which is far, far better.
Great Intellect...
I hope if they ever do cure it or create a vaccine they don't distribute it to anybody until it's available in sufficient quantity to give it to everyone on the planet and wipe out the disease before it can mutate into something else. What would really suck is if they cure a few thousand people, vaccinate a couple million, then it mutates into something that's even harder to cure because it becomes unreliant on this cholesterol shell.
Good point. Condoms, the pill, etc... are rated for prevention of pregnancy with perfect use, vs typical use. Condoms are about 99% effective with perfect use, vs. 97% effective with typical use. The pill is 99.9% perfect, vs 99% or so typical use.
Curious how abstinence ranks with typical use. :)
...my wife is. I read this and had a few questions, she verified that they were good questions. Questions such as "how do you turn it off in plasmacytoid dendritic cells without...I dunno...dying?" Cholesterol is sortof vital to pretty much everything in the body that is going on. It sounds like they "discovered" that all you have to do is destroy the glycoprotein gp120 and hey! You'll slow the spread of HIV. Alas, you'll also be dead. Point is, as cool as this sounds, it's substantially far off from being useful in an actual living organism.
still full of ridiculous rules like no sex outside of marriage
Lose that rule, and what exactly is the point of marriage? Really, that rule is kind of the whole point.
...who'll own the rights to it?
So, is stealing the cholesterol from the outer membrane of the virus fall under the definition of starving a cold?
"No good deed goes unpunished"