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Australian Scientists Discover Potential Aids Cure
smi.james.th writes "Several sites report that Australian researcher David Harrich and his team have potentially discovered a way to stop HIV becoming AIDS and ultimately cure the disease. From the article: 'What we've actually done is taken a normal virus protein that the virus needs to grow, and we've changed this protein, so that instead of assisting the virus, it actually impedes virus replication and does it quite strongly.' This could potentially hail one of modern medicine's greatest victories."
Let us celebrate with a trip to the brothel!
Yay!
... use condoms?
I might be slightly paranoid and I hope I am wrong, but why would big pharmacy want to produce this? They have a choice between selling someone a whole life really expensive medicines (well not to make, but to buy) or cure him... I am just going to assume that this method will be deemed 'unsafe'.
Not that they needed to be in the first place. They don't give young women mastectomies just to prevent them from getting breast cancer, you know?
Just starting animal trials. Too early to know if it's really going to work.
I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
I don't get it. This research is at such an early stage that there is no way to know whether is can work. Leave it in the science journal and when clinical trials are over then write about it.
Just like any potential cures to other major diseases that plague mankind this potential cure will be quietly buried and forgotten because god forbid the people who make money off drugs to prolong people suffering with HIV will suddenly go broke.
TFS has a quote that refers to changing an AIDS virus protein. How is that accomplished?
Thanks for any insights.
The researcher is AUSTRALIAN!
That makes this News for nerds, stuff that matters.
You will still be HIV positive and can spread the infection, to others that don't have the modified protein, as it don't completely inhibit HIV reproduction. It's still great news for suffers, if the animal trials are successful.
As opposed to what? "Could actually"?
Really want to be able to find a cure for AIDS as early as possible!In those patients reported see, is really too painful
If I had a Zimbabwean dollar for every time..... O, forget it.
Nothing will come of this for decades, even on the 1 in 1000000 chance that it actually works.
They should bar miserable old gits like myself from commenting on forums - we've been around too long so don't excited about every little 'new' thing every time some scientist gets excited about every little 'new' thing.
LOL at all the idiots on here - none of you even bother to RESEARCH any of this.
Indicator disease + HIV = 'AIDS'
Indicator disease - HIV = Indicator disease
That is a circular definition, and therefore proves nothing.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig7/foye8.1.1.html
Do some RESEARCH on whether HIV could possibly be the cause of what is termed 'AIDS' by the medical establishment.
How is HIV passed from women to men? Does it go down the man's urethra and somehow into his bloodstream? How, exactly?
How much HIV is present in vaginal fluids, and how much, if any, vaginal fluid, goes down a man's urethra when he is having sex?
Did any of you idiots bother to THINK about basic stuff like this?
Oh, I forgot - 'HERETIC! Burn him at the stake for questioning!'
Just thought I'd save you the bother. Idiots.
Will this method work against the common cold? *cough* *cough* It affects many more people than AIDS ever did. *trumpet sound* Probably causing more sick days at work as well. Can we, now that we have a cure for AIDS, please *cough* focus on finding a cure for the common cold? *Sneeze* It has been a menace for much longer than AIDS.
Now, if we can only figure out how to clone Freddie Mercury...
There have been a few announcements about a "cure." I hope one of them sticks. This is another interesting finding using a vaccine.
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the author.
and ultimately cure the disease.
For a treatment to be a cure it has to eliminate the virus from your system, and what is described in the summary doesn't seem to be that.
So I did the unthinkable and actually read the TFA (I know, I can't believe it myself). To the credit of the summary in it the reporter does claim that it's a cure. However just a couple of paragraphs over a scientist in the team is quoted as saying:
"You would still be infected with HIV, it's not a cure for the virus, but the virus would stay latent, it wouldn't wake up, so it wouldn't develop into Aids," he added.
So, no, it is not a cure, but a great promising treatment for the disease.
A cure for aids will not matter in the near or far future if Antibiotic-Resistant Gonorrhea continues to spread. The attitude in the public still seems to be that gonorrhea was something easily cured, but not always, not anymore.
If there was one "silver lining" about the whole HIV-AIDS issue was it forced people to take all STDs seriously. I think even the public attention on the the HPV vaccine has been helped directly or indirectly by attention to HIV. My personal fear is the day we "cure AIDS" we will all be set back to square one in the fight to stop any and all STDs. I hope I am wrong.
I believe this is cure for AIDS #3 on slashdot. Cures for cancer are at about 14. Cures for aging in general, at least 4. I think solar panels are at about 1000% efficiency too if you add up all the stories.
Just starting animal trials. Too early to know if it's really going to work.
The preliminary results of the animal trials are startlingly good, and in an interview the chief researcher said he believes the approval cycle will be short (ie: less than 5 years) because of the probability that this therapy will pass safety trials etc. We'll have to wait and see of course.
Which is fantastic, if you are a mouse with HIV. But, if you are a human with AIDS, you are still just as fucked as you were yesterday and there is, as yet, NO indication that you will be any less fucked in 5 years.
P.S. Déjà vu I've written that last line here on Slashdot before, several years ago.
Ok, anything that stops AIDS is great, don't get me wrong. I really do hope this works. But, can a person undergoing this therapy spread HIV? My guess is it is a lot less likely but still possible but that is an amateur, uneducated guess.
If so, what happens when the world is no longer afraid of AIDS but this medicine is still patented. No doubt it will be extended as many times as possible. Maybe they will even find a way to patent it in parts, staggered over time too.
Don't get me wrong, free love for all sounds great! With no AIDS though I can imagine a world where the majority of the population caries HIV. It would be not unlike how we almost all carry EBV now. Think of the power that puts in the hands of whoever holds that patent. Wow! Should we be scared?
This'll only work for spherical chickens in a vacuum.
Probably vaccine development, antibiotic development, and curable disease drug development ought to be run BY the people FOR the people. I.e., Government support of the research and development.
It would also lessen the motivation to pass off bad drugs onto the people for profit.
It's pretty insane that the US has a $600B military budget, when less than 10k people in the US die a year from hostile military action of any sort, yet 100k-ish US-ians die every year from antibiotic-resistant bugs. Can we have $100B/year for antibiotic development, please? If we were rational, we would probably swap the defense and medical research budgets!
--PM
I've been hearing about groundbreaking AIDS cures for at least 20 years. Sometimes, they're bold enough to tell us the production cure is a mere 5 years down the road. Meanwhile the researchers get flooded with investment dollars and we slowly forget about the claims. Same thing with cancer cures.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
So, Australian citizenship or not (I assume he has it by now), it's kind of a stretch to accurately describe the guy as Australian.
So then the only people who are Australian are the native aborigine folks? Because in case you forgot, Australia was a prison island for Britain starting around 1788, and it wasn't until the late 1930's that Australia severed government ties with Britain.
No? Okay, then how many generations of your family have to be from Australia for you to be Australian? 1? 2? 4?
If he has Australian citizenship, he is Australian. 10 years and marriage to someone whose family goes back a generation or two is more than enough for most. As an American, I consider someone an American when they get their citizenship. So do they.
Please help metamoderate.
I saw an article that a Google founder's mother has Parkinsons and that he carries a mutated gene that gives him a higher chance to get it. If anyone is going to use their fortunes to find a way to reprogram the human body to cure diseases I'd bet on him.
I believe there were some cases of curing HIV through spinal (fluid) transplants with some people who have an inbuilt immunity.
IIRC, the remnants of the disease was eventually eradicated by the immune system.
I'd imagine that if we can bottle it up more and more, eventually it will be cured from progression and transmission. If the body never suffers the effects of AIDS, perhaps they'll have more success giving it a way to kill off HIV.
If it works on HIV, the technique might be useable for cancer and similar diseases.
And for the homophobes, let me point out this might work on the children of infected mothers (or are you also so ignorant that you don't know anyone can catch it, and it can be inherited?)
Of course, as has been said for decades, AIDS shows that lesbians are God's Chosen People (tm).
mark
Three words: I Am Legend
Three Words: I Am Legend
Why offer a one-time cure when you can offer a life-time treatment
Curing or preventing a lethal disease extends a patient's life, making the patient a potential customer for a company's other drugs.
Pharmacies can (and do) change the generic vendor for a particular drug whenever they see fit.
Once a patient is doing well on one generic manufacturer's version of a particular drug, can't the doctor avoid "additional variables that are introduced as soon as the Pharmacy decides to switch to a different generic" by prescribing "fluoxephetamine by Teva, dispense as written"? It's like people sticking with Equate brand because they know what they're going to get out of Perrigo or whatever other company manufactures Equate drugs for Walmart.
The pharmacies all think it's okay to do so because the drugs are all the same... mostly
A trend of D.A.W. orders for a particular generic might be a step toward changing pharmacists' mind about this.
guess what would probably happen if the medical community as a whole settle in behind a particular generic? That generic essentially becomes the defacto drug and you lose a lot of the benefit of price wars that make generics GOOD for the consumer.
Eggs wouldn't be in one basket necessarily as much as two to four, depending on how many manufacturers make a particular generic drug. If there are at least two or three manufacturers, there's a bit of monopolistic competition going on, just as there's competition in my area between Faygo and Sam's Choice for cut-rate cola. But even with some barriers to switching, the threat of at least some doctors and patients switching to another brand (why did I just suddenly think of cigarettes?) should be enough to keep emerginng second-tier name brands from increasing their prices anywhere near what the monopoly used to charge.