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HIV Tracking Technology Could Pinpoint Who's Infecting Who
Daniel_Stuckey writes "No man is an island, but evolutionarily, each person functions like one for the HIV virus. That's according to Thomas Leitner, a researcher working on a project aimed at creating technology for tracking HIV through a population. The technology, which is being studied at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, may allow people to identify who infected them with the virus, a development that could have major implications in criminal proceedings. "If you're familiar with Darwin's finches, you have a population of birds on one island and they keep moving and evolving as they spread to other islands so that each population is a little different," Leitner said. "With HIV, it's the same. Every person infected with HIV has a slightly different form of the virus. It's the ultimate chameleon because it evolves this way.""
whom*
s/[stupid comments]/[intelligent discourse]/gi
I really do hope we're past the point that any major governments are populated with people that view AIDS as a "gay plague", because otherwise, I can easily see petty local leaders using this research to arrest sick people and charge them with murder.
While I can understand residual anger at the profession of the person who did that to you, it's not actually the case that doctors are malicious or generally ignorant.
I wanna get PAID. The implications will be far more profound in the tort law landscape as this technology is extended to be able to pinpoint the identity of someone who gave you any generic disease.
Think big. Think HPV, Hepatitis, Herpes, and the whole range of STDs.
Imagine the payout if you can prove that a wealthy person gave you the HPV that caused your cervical cancer? Imagine the payout your family will get if you die from it.
Trial lawyers are absolutely salivating over this, and I would not be surprised to see lawyers "investing" in this technology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV_superinfection
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Surely you mean who's infecting whom? Let's get our priorities straight: grammar first, world-changing health improvements second.
My genitals were mutilated and I suffered all that physical pain that forced me to effectively chose impotence as the solution so that now I'm protected from AIDS/GRID
The bad news is - no, you are not protected from AIDS.
You are just less likely to catch it voluntarily.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
it's not actually the case that doctors are malicious or generally ignorant.
I disagree. I think the majority of doctors, just like any profession, don't have a clue what they are doing. You have to search around to find anyone competent. I've lost count of the number of times I've had problems that bugged me for years... until I walked into the right doctors office and the doctor knew exactly what to do and cured me within weeks. The biggest problem with healthcare is the incompetence of our medical professionals. When you can have 2 hospitals in the same city, sitting less than a mile apart and one has a survival rate for heart surgery that's double or even triple the other hospitals, somethings Fing wrong. That sort of disparity happens in every town in this country and it's criminal that it's allowed to continue. They are literally killing tens of thousands of people with their incompetence.
You're right, there can be a large amount of difference even between co-infecting strains. However, there's quite a lot of potential variant sites - you can sort of think of it as a large multi-dimensional problem, which thousands of axes in which you can see variation. If strain A differs from strain B at 50 sites, and strain C from strain A at a separate 50 sites, A and C can have anywhere from 0-100 differences.
You can use some pretty simple formulas to estimate what the "infecting" strain looked like for any given person, as well (even if there are multiple separate infecting strains, possibly occurring at distinct times).*
While this approach won't be perfect (there _will_ be both false negatives and false positives), it's a fairly straight-forward application of available information. I am very worried about some law enforcement agency maintaining a database of HIV users, and running a blind search for any new infected patients. If they restrain themselves to only testing reasonable suspects (as additional evidence), this may be okay.
The AIDS-panic never really went away for a lot of people - I'm afraid that improper application of these modeling tools could easily bring it back.
*Full disclosure, I co-authored a paper on some preliminary work for this: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21716075
Do you get transfusions or donate blood, or did you do so before the tests improved?
How do you get HIV (or any other blood-borne disease) from donating blood?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I knew about the Human Immunodeficiency Virus. But not the Human Immunodeficiency Virus Virus.
FYI, that joke was generated with a PHP Preprocessor on my IBM Machine.
Having dealt with different health issues over the years, it is difficult for the layperson to judge the quality of their health care.
...and that's no accident. It doesn't have to be that way.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
Most people in the modern world have some idea of what makes them sick
Most people understand that if you drop a rock on your foot, it will hurt. But that doesn't mean they understand general relativity, and the gravitational warping of space-time that makes it happen.
Most people in the modern world don't have the first clue about software or what makes their computer crash.
This is because of apathy or intimidation rather than inherent complexity. The basic principles of computing are amazingly simple.