I question the 79 million people being infected. Per the CDC site, in the summary:
How do I know if I have HPV?
There is no test to find out a person’s “HPV status.” Also, there is no approved HPV test to find HPV in the mouth or throat.
So if there is no way to know if someone has HPV, then how the fuck can there be a count of the people with HPV.?
You can run a test on a pap smear. You can't tell if a *person* has HPV, only if the tissue you run the sample on does - it can be quite a local infection. A clean pap smear doesn't mean their whole body is clear, for instance. That's one reason why there's no test for men yet. The 79 million people number is primarily based on pap smear results and extrapolated to the general population, so it's unclear how good of an estimate it is.
Actually, the CDC provided the estimates. While the CDC is correct in that there's no one test for HPV status, you can test specific tissues for the virus - generally this is done via a pap smear. The estimates for overall population are partially based on extrapolating from pap smear results.
Furthermore, they aren't claiming they can cure it, just prevent most of the HPV strains that cause cancer.
Well, a good malaria vaccine would help a hell of a lot. Not as much as smallpox, but possibly about on the same impact level as polio. An HIV vaccine would be pretty impressive too.
HPV also causes other cancers, including penile and throat cancer. It's not just a concern for girls and women. If Girl #2's boyfriend had gotten the vaccine, he probably wouldn't have been able to pass it on to her.
Is the HPV vaccine the only way to prevent it? No, of course not, but it is a remarkably effective and safe way.
It is all the lies that the government and Pro-Vaxxers spew forth that make me trust that the vaccines are safe even less. Measles has never caused millions of deaths.
Not $1B in profits - unless you're talking about spreading that over a decade or more. Vaccine trials are expensive to run, and vaccines themselves are relatively expensive to make (rightly so, for injectables). They tend to be guaranteed volume on a vaccine, but they really don't make much money off of them, especially compared to other drugs they could spend the money on.
HPV is most commonly transmitted sexually, but can be transmitted through close skin-skin contact as well. HPV has also been linked to many other cancers, including penile cancer. It does seem like you and your wife are at extremely low risk for contracting HPV, so perhaps the vaccine isn't needed for either of you. That being said, as a public health recommendation, the HPV vaccine is good for most people, and should likely be routinely recommended.
Ah, but here you aren't considering where you got your numbers. For the sake of argument, let's use your risk levels. If whooping cough kills 1 in a million people now (with a vaccinated population), that bears almost no relation to what the risk is in an unvaccinated population. Nobody is worried about a hypothetical infection that kills 1 in a million people infected. If people stopped vaccinating for whooping cough because almost nobody dies from whooping cough (because almost nobody gets it in the first place, because they got the vaccine), then a lot of people are going to start dying from it.
For diseases where we either can't or haven't eradicated them, we need to keep vaccination rates up so that they don't come back. Theoretically, we could balance rates so that risk of disease is equal to risk of vaccine, but practically speaking that's not an option. Furthermore, a lot of viral infections have other long-lasting side effects that the vaccine doesn't have, so just looking at fatality rates isn't always the best way to assess risk.
Essentially, when you say "nobody is doing the complete risk analysis to see if paying Big Pharma is worth the money being poured into Vaccines", you're wrong. If we took your very basic analysis and made policy from it, we'd stop vaccinating, because it's twice as safe! And then whooping cough comes back, and it turns out that no, the vaccine is still safer. The population-level risk analysis is a lot more complicated than you're making it out to be.
Let's also not forget that HPV causes a number of different cancers - cervical, penile, throat, etc. This vaccine dramatically reduces your chances of HPV-caused cancer. The press most often focuses on cervical cancer when they talk about it, which is why the vaccine has been more targeted to women, but boys and men also get a direct benefit, as well as all the indirect benefits through herd immunity.
UK is a BIG english-speaking market, where people buy more goods online than in any other country in the world ( http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new... ).
Your statement is inaccurate. What your source says is that a higher proportion of Britons buy things online than any other OECD country, but the UK does not buy more goods online than any other country. Per capita, possibly (although the graph didn't show amount spent, only proportion who bought anything), but the US still spends far more as a whole. Furthermore, these five companies - with the exception of Microsoft - don't really sell much *to* people. They'd lose money pulling out of the UK, certainly, but it might still be more cost-effective in the long run.
That's fascinating, I had no idea the Yazidi's belief structure was like that. Quite an interesting take on it.
I knew that about Lucifer; I was always told that he'd been called that before the Fall because he brought God's light, but I hadn't heard that it was probably actually talking about the King of Babylon. Thanks for the info!
I mean, I'm not a Biblical scholar, but from what I remember from reading it, the Devil doesn't really do that much that's actually bad in the Bible. He disagrees with God, gives humans knowledge of good and evil (how is this bad?), and tells Jesus he should eat something when he's wandering around in the desert. God killed way more people. Let's also not forget that (according to the story anyway) Lucifer is a prisoner in Hell, not the ruler of it. Maybe I'm forgetting some stories, but from what I do remember, the Devil seems like a more reasonable personality than God does (especially in the Old Testament - New Testament God is better).
I agree that the people writing the software shouldn't necessarily be on the paper. However, I think they should still get credit for working on it. If you're in a community of scientists, all working on related projects that require complicated software, doesn't it make the most sense to have a few people develop it and distribute it to everyone else, rather than each lab having to make their own? Having one standardized version (or package, since not everyone will be on the same version) makes it easier to troubleshoot and reproduce results.
And, if it's easier or better to have a few people make it - or most people do a little bit rather than the whole thing - you need an incentive to get them to do it. Credit, in some form, seems like the best way to go about that.
If it was a major research campus, I'm sure they have it by now. I kind of hate doing mini-preps, but for some reason I don't mind doing giga-preps. And yeah, sequencing data can be annoying to get through, depending on what you're trying to do (and how good your map is...). That's really unfortunate about the gloves. I don't know what I'd do if that happened to me!
For big projects, you're right, this won't do that much (although $990 is enough to buy a nice repeating pipettor...). However, it does lower the bar for smaller projects, especially those with cheaper initial labor costs (projects for undergrads to play around with, for example). It's not a game-changer, but it'll probably be useful in some scenarios.
Your experience may still hold true for small labs, but many research campuses have sequencing cores now with fast turn-around. I give them the tube with DNA and primers, and they email me the sequence data the next day (rarely, it'll take them two days). I hear there's a company in NYC that promises 12-hour turnaround for samples they get in the city. Now, smaller institutions may take more time, but sequencing has been advancing pretty quickly as of late.
This is true - at the moment, there is no significant research using replicating gene therapy vectors for treating genetic diseases. Anti-cancer gene therapy vectors often are replication-competent, but for treating things like DMD or hemophilia the vectors cannot replicate.
At the moment, the FDA prohibits any gene therapy with a significant chance of germ line effects. So, for now, people with DMD who get gene therapy would still pass on their mutation. In principle, we could design something with intentional germ line effects, but that gets a lot trickier and we aren't sure enough about the safety for that yet.
(Gene editing has a history of being imprecise, keep in mind to treat a genetic disease this also means delivering to each affected cell in the body.)
Not true. Most genetic diseases don't require treating every affected cell, and in some cases not even a majority need to be treated. DMD only really affects the muscles, so no non-muscle cells need to be changed. Furthermore, since this is a gene editing strategy, they could probably afford to only (or primarily) target the muscle stem cells.
Actually, systemic viral delivery doesn't work well to skeletal muscle in larger animals. Isolated limb transvenular administration is the best way at the moment, but it's unclear whether you could modify the technique enough to effectively target the diaphragm/heart. Furthermore, you can also use tissue-specific promoters and/or miRNA to confine your effects to particular tissues or eliminate them from others.
I agree this technique is still a long way from useful, though.
Many molecular biologists seem to have this hubris that they completely understand the mechanics of DNA and genes. They are so specialized, they do not know what their tinkering may do to an organism down the road and long after they have been published or even dead.
As a molecular biologist, most of us know that we don't completely understand the mechanics of DNA and genes. We do, however, know a lot more than the average person, and we know a lot about the dystrophin gene, as we've been studying it for a long time. We also know that even if we do screw something up, it's unlikely that it'll cause something worse than DMD already is. Furthermore, this cure - and indeed, any gene therapy cure that could go to clinical trials at the moment - is not passed on in the germ line, meaning it's not heritable.
This technique may for instance cause sever cardiovascular issues. The heart is a muscle and when they get too muscular you get diseases like cardiomyopathy.
Do you really think this is something they haven't considered? Yes, the heart is made of muscle, but cardiomyocytes are different from skeletal myocytes. Furthermore, the gene delivery treatments used to target skeletal muscle are generally different than what you'd use to target the heart, and of course they aren't going to ignore the heart, they aren't idiots. They aren't so focused on "their field" that they'd ignore an organ that's affected by DMD in their analyses.
Slashdot Mirror
I question the 79 million people being infected. Per the CDC site, in the summary:
How do I know if I have HPV? There is no test to find out a person’s “HPV status.” Also, there is no approved HPV test to find HPV in the mouth or throat.
So if there is no way to know if someone has HPV, then how the fuck can there be a count of the people with HPV.?
You can run a test on a pap smear. You can't tell if a *person* has HPV, only if the tissue you run the sample on does - it can be quite a local infection. A clean pap smear doesn't mean their whole body is clear, for instance. That's one reason why there's no test for men yet. The 79 million people number is primarily based on pap smear results and extrapolated to the general population, so it's unclear how good of an estimate it is.
Actually, the CDC provided the estimates. While the CDC is correct in that there's no one test for HPV status, you can test specific tissues for the virus - generally this is done via a pap smear. The estimates for overall population are partially based on extrapolating from pap smear results.
Furthermore, they aren't claiming they can cure it, just prevent most of the HPV strains that cause cancer.
Well, a good malaria vaccine would help a hell of a lot. Not as much as smallpox, but possibly about on the same impact level as polio. An HIV vaccine would be pretty impressive too.
HPV also causes other cancers, including penile and throat cancer. It's not just a concern for girls and women. If Girl #2's boyfriend had gotten the vaccine, he probably wouldn't have been able to pass it on to her.
Is the HPV vaccine the only way to prevent it? No, of course not, but it is a remarkably effective and safe way.
It is all the lies that the government and Pro-Vaxxers spew forth that make me trust that the vaccines are safe even less. Measles has never caused millions of deaths.
From the WHO:
In 1980, before widespread vaccination, measles caused an estimated 2.6 million deaths each year.
Approximately 114 900 people died from measles in 2014 – mostly children under the age of 5.
Now, what were you lying?
Not $1B in profits - unless you're talking about spreading that over a decade or more. Vaccine trials are expensive to run, and vaccines themselves are relatively expensive to make (rightly so, for injectables). They tend to be guaranteed volume on a vaccine, but they really don't make much money off of them, especially compared to other drugs they could spend the money on.
HPV is most commonly transmitted sexually, but can be transmitted through close skin-skin contact as well. HPV has also been linked to many other cancers, including penile cancer. It does seem like you and your wife are at extremely low risk for contracting HPV, so perhaps the vaccine isn't needed for either of you. That being said, as a public health recommendation, the HPV vaccine is good for most people, and should likely be routinely recommended.
Ah, but here you aren't considering where you got your numbers. For the sake of argument, let's use your risk levels. If whooping cough kills 1 in a million people now (with a vaccinated population), that bears almost no relation to what the risk is in an unvaccinated population. Nobody is worried about a hypothetical infection that kills 1 in a million people infected. If people stopped vaccinating for whooping cough because almost nobody dies from whooping cough (because almost nobody gets it in the first place, because they got the vaccine), then a lot of people are going to start dying from it.
For diseases where we either can't or haven't eradicated them, we need to keep vaccination rates up so that they don't come back. Theoretically, we could balance rates so that risk of disease is equal to risk of vaccine, but practically speaking that's not an option. Furthermore, a lot of viral infections have other long-lasting side effects that the vaccine doesn't have, so just looking at fatality rates isn't always the best way to assess risk.
Essentially, when you say "nobody is doing the complete risk analysis to see if paying Big Pharma is worth the money being poured into Vaccines", you're wrong. If we took your very basic analysis and made policy from it, we'd stop vaccinating, because it's twice as safe! And then whooping cough comes back, and it turns out that no, the vaccine is still safer. The population-level risk analysis is a lot more complicated than you're making it out to be.
Let's also not forget that HPV causes a number of different cancers - cervical, penile, throat, etc. This vaccine dramatically reduces your chances of HPV-caused cancer. The press most often focuses on cervical cancer when they talk about it, which is why the vaccine has been more targeted to women, but boys and men also get a direct benefit, as well as all the indirect benefits through herd immunity.
UK is a BIG english-speaking market, where people buy more goods online than in any other country in the world ( http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new... ).
Your statement is inaccurate. What your source says is that a higher proportion of Britons buy things online than any other OECD country, but the UK does not buy more goods online than any other country. Per capita, possibly (although the graph didn't show amount spent, only proportion who bought anything), but the US still spends far more as a whole. Furthermore, these five companies - with the exception of Microsoft - don't really sell much *to* people. They'd lose money pulling out of the UK, certainly, but it might still be more cost-effective in the long run.
Nothing in what you said prohibits *Twitter* from banning her for releasing private information, though.
That's fascinating, I had no idea the Yazidi's belief structure was like that. Quite an interesting take on it.
I knew that about Lucifer; I was always told that he'd been called that before the Fall because he brought God's light, but I hadn't heard that it was probably actually talking about the King of Babylon. Thanks for the info!
Ah, that's right, I'd forgotten about that one. God kind of egged him on with that one, though.
Depending on time to the ER, knife wounds can be just as deadly as gunshot wounds.
I mean, I'm not a Biblical scholar, but from what I remember from reading it, the Devil doesn't really do that much that's actually bad in the Bible. He disagrees with God, gives humans knowledge of good and evil (how is this bad?), and tells Jesus he should eat something when he's wandering around in the desert. God killed way more people. Let's also not forget that (according to the story anyway) Lucifer is a prisoner in Hell, not the ruler of it. Maybe I'm forgetting some stories, but from what I do remember, the Devil seems like a more reasonable personality than God does (especially in the Old Testament - New Testament God is better).
I agree that the people writing the software shouldn't necessarily be on the paper. However, I think they should still get credit for working on it. If you're in a community of scientists, all working on related projects that require complicated software, doesn't it make the most sense to have a few people develop it and distribute it to everyone else, rather than each lab having to make their own? Having one standardized version (or package, since not everyone will be on the same version) makes it easier to troubleshoot and reproduce results.
And, if it's easier or better to have a few people make it - or most people do a little bit rather than the whole thing - you need an incentive to get them to do it. Credit, in some form, seems like the best way to go about that.
Depends - if it's the size of the pickup truck's bed, that's probably easy enough to read anyway.
If it was a major research campus, I'm sure they have it by now. I kind of hate doing mini-preps, but for some reason I don't mind doing giga-preps. And yeah, sequencing data can be annoying to get through, depending on what you're trying to do (and how good your map is...). That's really unfortunate about the gloves. I don't know what I'd do if that happened to me!
For big projects, you're right, this won't do that much (although $990 is enough to buy a nice repeating pipettor...). However, it does lower the bar for smaller projects, especially those with cheaper initial labor costs (projects for undergrads to play around with, for example). It's not a game-changer, but it'll probably be useful in some scenarios.
Your experience may still hold true for small labs, but many research campuses have sequencing cores now with fast turn-around. I give them the tube with DNA and primers, and they email me the sequence data the next day (rarely, it'll take them two days). I hear there's a company in NYC that promises 12-hour turnaround for samples they get in the city. Now, smaller institutions may take more time, but sequencing has been advancing pretty quickly as of late.
This is true - at the moment, there is no significant research using replicating gene therapy vectors for treating genetic diseases. Anti-cancer gene therapy vectors often are replication-competent, but for treating things like DMD or hemophilia the vectors cannot replicate.
At the moment, the FDA prohibits any gene therapy with a significant chance of germ line effects. So, for now, people with DMD who get gene therapy would still pass on their mutation. In principle, we could design something with intentional germ line effects, but that gets a lot trickier and we aren't sure enough about the safety for that yet.
(Gene editing has a history of being imprecise, keep in mind to treat a genetic disease this also means delivering to each affected cell in the body.)
Not true. Most genetic diseases don't require treating every affected cell, and in some cases not even a majority need to be treated. DMD only really affects the muscles, so no non-muscle cells need to be changed. Furthermore, since this is a gene editing strategy, they could probably afford to only (or primarily) target the muscle stem cells.
Actually, systemic viral delivery doesn't work well to skeletal muscle in larger animals. Isolated limb transvenular administration is the best way at the moment, but it's unclear whether you could modify the technique enough to effectively target the diaphragm/heart. Furthermore, you can also use tissue-specific promoters and/or miRNA to confine your effects to particular tissues or eliminate them from others.
I agree this technique is still a long way from useful, though.
Many molecular biologists seem to have this hubris that they completely understand the mechanics of DNA and genes. They are so specialized, they do not know what their tinkering may do to an organism down the road and long after they have been published or even dead.
As a molecular biologist, most of us know that we don't completely understand the mechanics of DNA and genes. We do, however, know a lot more than the average person, and we know a lot about the dystrophin gene, as we've been studying it for a long time. We also know that even if we do screw something up, it's unlikely that it'll cause something worse than DMD already is. Furthermore, this cure - and indeed, any gene therapy cure that could go to clinical trials at the moment - is not passed on in the germ line, meaning it's not heritable.
This technique may for instance cause sever cardiovascular issues. The heart is a muscle and when they get too muscular you get diseases like cardiomyopathy.
Do you really think this is something they haven't considered? Yes, the heart is made of muscle, but cardiomyocytes are different from skeletal myocytes. Furthermore, the gene delivery treatments used to target skeletal muscle are generally different than what you'd use to target the heart, and of course they aren't going to ignore the heart, they aren't idiots. They aren't so focused on "their field" that they'd ignore an organ that's affected by DMD in their analyses.