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In New Study, HIV Prevention Pill Truvada Is 100% Effective
An anonymous reader writes: A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases details the recent trial of a drug named Truvada, which researchers think might excel at preventing HIV infections (abstract). The scientists administered the drug to 657 people at high risk for contracting HIV, including users of injected drugs. At the end of the study, every single subject was still free of the virus. This is encouraging news in the fight against AIDS, though it shouldn't be taken to mean the drug is perfectly effective. Since researchers can't ethically expose people to HIV, we don't know for sure that any of the subjects were definitely saved by the drug. Other studies have also had to be stopped because it was clear subjects who were on a placebo were suffering from noticeably higher rates of infection. Leaders in the fight against AIDS say this new study closes a "critical gap" in existing research by demonstrating that Truvada can work in real-world health programs.
How long until resistance is developed? Or how does this drug prevent it?
That is all.
The scientists administered the drug to 657 people at high risk for contracting HIV, including users of injected drugs. At the end of the study, every single subject was still free of the virus.
Can anyone who can view more than the abstract tell me how many they would normally expect to contract HIV?
I stole this Sig
Yes. Continue promiscuous behavior and see what other diseases will evolve.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Good comeback. I like your use of the word "evolve."
I can continue to never wear a rubber.
Yeah, virgin lifestyle is pretty much unaffected by this breakthrough.
Actually that's been one of the real concerns of the drug. Apparently people on the drug are seeing higher incidences of HPV (genital warts), herpes, gonorrhea, chlamydia, and syphilis.
I am curious though -- why isn't this drug able to effectively shut down the virus in infected patients? I understand why it could never cure it (there would be plenty of hiding places for the virus that the drug likely wouldn't end up) but not why it can't remove all of the symptoms. It's not a vaccine, so it doesn't rely on your immune system to remove an early infection, hence you'd figure it would work on somebody already infected. Can somebody explain the biochemistry on that? I'd like to know.
Yay! If we could squash HIV maybe we can finally stop using it as a weak excuse for circumcision. (Don't get me wrong, obviously HIV is a bigger problem than circumcision but it'd be a nice side effect)
Yeah, virgin lifestyle is pretty much unaffected by this breakthrough.
Like they say, don't think of it as a "virgin lifestyle," think of it as "recursive iso-monogamy."
Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
100% of participants also did not get lap dances from a Kardashian.
Causation, correlation, or conspiracy? Choose your own adventure.
Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
As someone who is gay, I have done a fair bit of research in to HIV, the way people become infected, treatments, preventative measures, etc. I am not HIV positive, so perhaps not as much research as someone who is HIV positive... but in being gay, HIV is a topic that pops up. I am not a biochemist, but I know the basics.
Truvada IS one of the drugs you can take if you become infected with HIV. If you are HIV positive, it works in combination with other drugs to prevent the virus from replicating itself. It inhibits some process the virus uses to attach to other cells in order to get the cell to manufacture new copies of the virus. This means the virus is unable to replicate itself in your blood stream.
When you become HIV positive the virus also lives in parts of your body other than your blood stream. The HIV medications can't reach these locations so they just live there and it doesn't compromise your immune system for the virus to be in those parts of your body. Your blood stream is clear of the virus so your immune system operates more normally and can fight infections. But once you stop taking the drug, the component of the drug that inhibits its replication in the blood stream is no longer there. So the virus is able to then start replicating itself in your blood stream again and symptoms return.
Truvada as a preventative works because the virus can never gain a foot hold in your blood stream to make it to the other parts of your body it can live outside of the influence of the drug. If you get exposed to HIV while on Truvada, the virus just enters your blood stream, can't replicate, and it eventually dies.
What other parts of the body does the virus reside in?
Being forced to take a drug forever to keep the virus at-bay with no cure, profitably for the pharmaceutical company, sounds like good fodder for conspriacy theorists.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
So, like, all of the religious pundits that constantly want to use their religion to force public policy?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Headline;
In New Study, HIV Prevention Pill Truvada Is 100% Effective
Summary;
This is encouraging news in the fight against AIDS, though it shouldn't be taken to mean the drug is perfectly effective.
Slashdot needs new editors.
Humans have been promiscuous since before there was anything vaguely promiscuous. People fuck, and they fuck a lot, and they often fuck people other than the people they've promised to be the only ones they'll fuck, and they fuck even when fucking means they get bad diseases, so anything that makes fucking safer is a good thing.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Why is it a dick-move for the company? The subjects of the study were already engaging in the behaviors known to be vectors for HIV spread, not only were they not asked to engage in risky behavior, they were probably not provided any sort of encouragement or discouragement as to the nature of their behavior at all. Nor is this like the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, where people known to be infected were intentionally not treated and were lied-to about being untreated. If anything, that the testers felt that the detected spread of HIV in the placebo group meant that there was no reason to continue the placebo/control aspect of the experiment and they wrapped it up early then they're actually being better for it; the patients might not have even known they were HIV infected through their behavior if the study hadn't detected it and notified them.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Multiple studies were cancelled because the placebo group was contracting HIV at an alarming rate.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
I have psoriatic arthritis, an auto-immune condition that is effectively the opposite of HIV. Instead of a weak immune system, mine is so jacked up it causes harm to my own body (it does mean I never get the flu and rarely ever have colds.) I have to use Humira to keep it at bay, and if I don't I will be crippled sooner, at a cost of nearly $3K a month. No conspiracy to it and I am sure it is profitable for the company. I am probably in the same boat as a person protected from AIDS by this drug; taking it is the difference between life and an early, miserable death.
Case in point, I just checked my own health plan's website, and if I wanted to go on Truvada, it would cost me $1762.61 for a 90-day supply.
Rounding to make the math simple... $600 a month is a car payment, for a fairly expensive car. In some places, that could be an entire rent check or even mortgage payment. That's overtly extortionate for a life-saving preventative treatment. And I, at least, would have *some* coverage for it. According to drugs.com, retail pricing runs about $1500 per 30-days. That rises up to a C. Montgomery Burns level of inhumanity.
Imagine all the people...
My guess is similar to how the virus that causes chickenpox (varicella) remains in your body permanently even after your symptoms are gone. Usually that's areas where there's no blood but there is fluidic tissue that provides homeostasis that it can survive in. For example, spinal fluid, brain tissue, etc.
Given that HIV is a really small virus (that is, smaller than most viruses) I'm sure there are plenty of areas that it can reside in.
What other parts of the body does the virus reside in?
Being forced to take a drug forever to keep the virus at-bay with no cure, profitably for the pharmaceutical company, sounds like good fodder for conspriacy theorists.
HIV is a retrovirus, which means that it splices its genome into the genome of the infected human's cells, forcing the cells to produce copies of the virus as part of their normal operation. When the cells divide and produce new human cells the virus producing code gets copied to the new cell and when that new cell undergoes cell division the code gets copied again, and so on and so forth.
I guess you could say that there is an evolution-made conspiracy of evil viruses that makes it hard to cure HIV.
Obviously, the solution is to contract HIV and see if the two balance each other out.
"Apparently people on the drug are seeing higher incidences of HPV (genital warts), herpes, gonorrhea, chlamydia, and syphilis."
Read the summary a bit closer: "Other studies have also had to be stopped because it was clear subjects who were on a placebo were suffering from noticeably higher rates of infection."
Which is rather to be expected since these people think that they can fuck without protection, and were on a PLACEBO.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
And if it don't move, they give it a shove and then they fuck it.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Except you're the Supreme Being, so you can fix all the bugs in MGSV and Arkham Knight and pwn all the noobs (though I understand Michael the Archangel is internationally ranked on Splatoon).
And, you can change it up any time you want. Have the hot chicks with snacks come at 10am and answer prayers in the evening if you want. Play Xbox One instead of Playstation. Have spicy wings instead of pizza. Do whatever you want because you're the Supreme Being, dammit.
I still don't see what God would have to be so pissed about that He feels the need to send disease and pestilence to humans who didn't ask to be created, after all.
You are welcome on my lawn.
You do not revere the Ori? They ask nothing from us, only that we follow the path set out for us in Origin.
This kind of solution is really the only kind that drug companies are actively researching and bringing to market.
They have no interest in one-pill fixes, because they don't make nearly the profit that 'forever' pills do.
Honestly the whole "drug companies only make treatments" conspiracy theory is a big load of uneducated horse shit. If there's a cure that "they" don't want you to know about, then go invent it yourself. There are a LOT of diseases that the pharmaceutical industry has cured, and continues to cure. Unfortunately these are mostly just bacterial infections. As it turns out, bacteria are a lot easier to fight than viruses. Same with cancer, which curing it effectively means killing tissue that's part of your own body. And our knowledge of the immune system isn't good enough to be able to cure autoimmune diseases.
So what would you prefer? People just go untreated while we wait for a cure that may never come?
You might want to look up what "contraception" is.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I still don't see what God would have to be so pissed about that He feels the need to send disease and pestilence to humans who didn't ask to be created, after all.
Well the old testament is more along the lines of "worship god or he might just be a complete bastard to you (well OK he be a bastard to you anyway, but you're better off playing the odds)".
Which is at least more internally consistent than the supposed nice god.
The funny thing is that the stories about a supposed supreme being put me in mind of the song "Big Rock Candy Mountain", because that captures intentionally something fundamental which is in a lot of those other stories. The song is about a hobo's paradise. In that version of paradise, nothing has really changed, except that everything individually is better: the hobo in question doesn't even stop getting bitten by bulldogs, it's just that in paradise they have rubber teeth. I like the song because I think it really captures how people think and dream. But because it focusses on a hobo, it's more obviously and intentionally absurd.
I think it strikes at a fundamentally human thing in imagining things to be just a little bit better than they are now. And that's what the supreme being is. With a few thousand years of hindsight and philosophical hindsight we can start to think what omnipotent really means. But back then they were just imagining things a bit better than they were currently.
It's not that the tribes of Israel (for example) weren't getting bitten by bulldogs (or stuck in the desert for 40 years), it's that it didn't hurt as much (i,.e. they survived and eventually found the supposed land of milk and honey).
Likewise getting better from disease is something that happened, so god helping you and curing you seemed like a reasonable leg up. It's not changing the world, it's the same world, but a bit better. The idea of wiping out disease entirely I think required some philosophical leaps which hadn't really happened yet.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
If two homosexuals were in an exclusive, monogomous relationship, they wouldn't have to worry about HIV in the first place. Now, the fact that many homosexuals engage in promiscuous sexual behavior, is a major factor in the high transmission rate of HIV among homosexuals.
Now, if you are suggesting that man made drugs allow people to continue engaging in promiscuous sexual behavior in defiance of God, then you have made a point.
While this is true, the AIDS virus has one trick that "breaks through" this type of "protection." Basically, for the behavior to work, the participants would have to have a _lifetime_ monogamy of partners. The time period between infection and sickness/death is very long with the AIDS virus. (Not always, but it can be.)
Because that period is quite long it's quite possible to get infected by one serial monogamy partner and then carry AIDS, get a different partner a decade later and then spread it.
If you look at the marriage patterns of folks like the sanctimonious twatwaffle I quoted above where two, maybe three marriages over the course of fertile years are common... they don't have any more protection than any heterosexual couples with long term partners do. And that's without counting all the adultery going on.
Yes, bath houses and glory holes and IV drugs made a huge impact on how fast it spread. But don't be thinking because you behave like your church says you should that you are protected, because you aren't.
Aside from lots of partners, there's one huge risk factor that makes a big difference in infection rates, anal sex. Refraining from anal sex (even where an infected partner is involved) will drastically reduce risk of transmission.
Bad comparison, because God does not voluntarily cause evil to happen,
Yes he does. He hardened the Pharoah's heart in order to make him do evil by not releasing the tribes of Israel. It's Exodus 9:12. That is god being a dick and making the Pharoah do evil.
it is allowed to happen because it is a consequence of man's abandonment of God
Unless god feels like forcing it as in Exodus 9:12.
and if God simply spared us from all of the repercussions of that choice,
How is hardening the Pharoah's heart sparing from reprecussions of the choice? The Pharoah was going to make the opposite choice until god diddled his brain and changed his mind.
then there would not have been any point in giving man a free will in the first place.
It's not free will if god makes you chose the way he wants, which is preisely what he does in Exodus 9:12.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
That makes me wonder... Who the hell shares needles in this day and age? I no longer abuse opiates and was an IV drug abuser for years and years. Never, not once, did I share a rig with anyone. For two bucks you can get a ten pack. For twenty bucks you can find someone who gets insulin rigs regularly and buy a box of 1000 from them. I hadn't shot up much prior to the AIDS scare but I had and even then we didn't share rigs. I may have reused my own rig from time to time but sharing it? That's straight up retarded.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
As for industry curing things, not so much. Most cures come about from publicly funded research, which industry then gets patents for. The public of course get screwed by high prescription prices due to guaranteed monopolies granted by the same government that gave these bastards the research to make the products in the first place.
The publicly funded research just finds a cause and effect. That's it. The process of formulating a chemical that both A) Target's the cause and B) doesn't kill the patient is a process that costs perhaps billions to do, and even more if there's a deadly side effect and it's necessary not only to recall, but to compensate those who took the drug (i.e. fen-phen.) Clinical trials are NOT cheap; hell just getting to the point of a clinical trial is not cheap. The chemical that results from this process is what gets patented. If they didn't get a patent on it, chances are they'd never bother with it because they'd never recoup their investment.
You're almost funny if I didn't think you're a right wing troll when it comes to inventing one's own cure.
Well you talk like a cure is so damn easy but "they just won't make one" so either put up or shut the fuck up.
Look at how they react to medical marijuana
"They" aren't the pharmaceutical industry. "They" are the federal government. Actually pharma would love for that to be legal. Why? More product to sell. There are literally hundreds of different ways you can formulate treatments based on cannabis, because different parts of the plant are used for different treatment (and contrary to popular belief, these don't involve the psychoactive component, THC.) And you know what else? There are plenty of them likely yet to be discovered, and when they are, patented. So if you want medical marijuana legalized across the whole US, you're pointing your hippie cannon at the wrong people.
As part of its lifecycle, HIV integrates its viral DNA into the DNA of the cell it infects. In a normal infection, the viral DNA is then processed by the infected cell's own gene expression machinery and the virus starts to replicate. However, sometimes instead of the virus being expressed and made, the DNA is "silenced" by the infected cell, meaning the viral DNA is there but not being actively expressed by the infected cell. These cells then harbor the latent virus for as long as these cells are alive, which for some memory immune cells can be for the rest of your life. This is the virus reservoir. If you take anti-retroviral therapy (ART) drugs, such as the NNRTIs mentioned before or protease or integrase inhibitors, these will inhibit active viral replication, but won't cause any harm to the reservoir viruses that are latent. Randomly* as well, these "silenced" virus DNAs in infected cells that make up the reservoir can become un-silenced, and the virus will start replicating. If you are still taking ART, then nothing happens. If, however, you stop taking the medication, these viruses that pop back up will re-start the HIV infection and within a few weeks you will be HIV+ with viral loads (amount of virus in your blood) the same as before the ART treatment was started. This is why the ART medication must be taken for the rest of the patient's life, not because big Pharma wants to make extra cash.
Interestingly, if you follow patients that have lapses in their ART treatment and sequence the viruses that repopulate the infection, they become more similar (clonal) over time, due in part to the reservoir cells! Since potentially a single virus will do the repopulating from a reservoir cell, you would expect the resulting population of viruses to be more similar to each other than in the original infection, and this is what is observed: Specific HIV integration sites are linked to clonal expansion and persistence of infected cells .
* Random by measurement, not necessarily by mechanism.