all the jobs that require your physical presence are generally 'IT technician' jobs - pulling cat5 through walls, swapping out hard disks in PCs and that kind of thing - the lower paid end of the IT spectrum (although there are higher paid network engineering types of jobs).
There are still a lot of companies which value face to face communications. If you think that any IT job can be offshored, try getting a web programming job at a local community college on the other side of the US. Chances are, they'll want you to be onsite. Maybe that job will be offshored eventually, but for small and medium sized businesses, they want SOMEONE to physically show up at the office, eat lunch with their coworkers, etc. Maybe this desire is irrational, but there are some costs in terms of poorer communication which makes some offshoring more expensive.
Besides, very few good paying jobs of any kind technically require a person's presence. Look on the dark side of things. Why not have a doctor's office with a few nurses, a video setup, and some nice Philippine doctors on the other end. Samples can be sent off to foriegn labs. Same with teachers, as long as there's someone in the room to make sure people behave. Or do we only offshore those things where customers won't be immediately aware that the job is offshored? IT is not particularly less safe than most other jobs, if you want to take outsourcing to an extreme. The difference is that it tends to be more cutting edge than other fields, and the most exposed to innovation and change.
Well, the husband had the choice of breaking the law or saving his wife, and decided to save his wife. I see nothing wrong with that;
It's a mitigating circumstance, certainly. Would your opinion be different if the medicine cost $1,000,000 and the theif still left only $2000 (all he had?)
What if the medicine cost $10,000,000 to produce and $1 each to manufacture and was being sold at $1000 a pill.
The problem is, it's easier to enter into business where you're selling worthless junk than it is to enter into lifesaving fields like medicine. If you're selling worthless junk, noone cares if you overcharge, if you mess up, etc. In medicine, a person doesn't even start to break even financially until their early thirties at least. And if there's not enough incentive to make that sacrifice, you're going to have a doctor shortage. Which (surprise!) we do.
The HMOs trying to manage costs ought to be paying for people to go through medical school. It's that investment and commitment that they're essentially leaching off of.
My only beef against the drug industries are that they don't follow the rules. They put out misleading information (Searle was trying to argue that COX-1 served no function in adult humans because they were pushing Celebrex, a selective COX-2 inhibitor) or else they patent things that aren't theres (consider the history of AZT. Finally a Canadian company basically said 'the US patent is BS. We're making the stuff and if they want to sue us they'll lose. Not that AZT was a particularly wonderful drug. But I digress...)
And of course the best solution is publically funded socialized medical system where such situations simply won't happen, since the government pays for medicine and bread.
There aren't enough resources for everyone to receive the maximum standard of care. Just because it's government funded doesn't mean that it's free. There will always be trade offs between costs and benefits. And those with more money will be better positioned to procure resources.
You should study some quantum physics before you condescend to other people. You can have action at a distance faster than light, but you can't use it to transmit information.
If Zion wasn't a simulation, then how is it that Neo had his powers outside of the matrix? That seemed to clinch things for me.
Bear in mind, the cross that appears when Neo sacrifices himself is not the Christian cross. It's the gnostic cross. An even-armed cross inside a circle. It means somthing different than the Christian cross.
The term "sons of God" and "sons of men" can be found in the Old Testament near the beginning of Genesis shortly after Adam and Eve leave Eden. The hebrew "B'nai elohim" (Sons of God) can also be translated as "sons of the powerful."
But is isn't contrary to Jewish thought to say "we are all God's children." I don't know of anything in the old testament which claims that the Messiah is supposed to be Christos, a begotten son of God. Perhaps someone can enlighten me? That was more a notion in the pagan cultures, so far as I know, where decent from a deity affirmed a person's right to rule. Emperors proclaimed themselves divine or the children of Gods.
In orthodox Christianity, The holy spirit (also present in the Jewish faith as the portion of God which can be viewed/experienced by a living person) took form in Jesus.
Most likely the Hebrew Mechiach(annointed one) was translated into the greek Christos, and the meaning changed. Most of the claims about Jesus as a begotten son of God hail from the time of John long after Jesus's murder.
1. If you can organize groups, you will get more done than if you work solo. Look at manager's salaries compared to the majority of other professions.
2. Einstein did good work. But he never beat Kazaak. MMORPGs don't teach you how to be a good theoretical physicist.
Some players develop skills in planning.
3. Video games don't really teach planning and coordination. It'd be nice if they did. They may teach basic tactics, but the hallmark of nearly all games is instant gratification in various doses. No video game I've ever played made me any better at project management or scheduling. At best, they've helped to reinforce my understanding of 'just in time solutions.'
And I'm fine with that as long as my taxes aren't going to pay for things like medicare to pay for your diabetes or heart disease or whatever else you gave to yourself through your irresponsible eating/smoking/whatever habits.
Well, it's that or social security checks. Socialism. You're damned if they do, and you're damned if they don't.
I don't claim to have the right to use legal coersion to tell people what to do. But if I had kids, I wouldn't want them using marijuana. I wouldn't buy it for someone. I wouldn't encourage anyone to use it. There are exceptions, of course. Some people with ADD seem to benefit from it. Some people take it medicinally. But believing in freedom doesn't mean I have to give up my ideas of what is beneficial or harmful to others. If a person is an Epicurian and believes that pleasure is the ultimate goal in life, it's fair to say to him, if you care about him, "in the long run, your behavior will bring more pain than pleausre and is not consistant with the value that you place on feeling good." The decision is still his (or hers) of course.
If a company includes ethical principles in its charter, it is legally allowed to consider things other than profits. This type of thing is rare, but it does happen.
There certainly moral and ethical corporations. But corporate morality and ehticality ends up getting framed in terms of greed. If a corporation pays its employees a good wage, it's assumed to get better or more loyal employees from this.
There's more of a compelling economic interest to allow cars than there is to allow cigarettes. If we banned cars, we'd do a lot of damage to people's livlihood. So we deal with the situation and there are laws to minimize the pollution done by cars, mandating catalytic converters and otherwise regulating emmissions.
There is not a right answer.
Maybe not in terms of ideology and formal logic, but some value systems produce healthier, happier communities than others. The best laws seek a balance between various interests.
I'd be fine with seeing weed legalized (and taxed) since I don't think stoners are a danger to others. There's not really any rational reason not to. Of course, I don't think people should use the stuff, but you have to have a good reason to impinge on what people do in the privacy of their own homes.
the only thing I like about Slashdot is the way you nerds have 'Lord of the Flies'ed yourselves into a pecking order like any other social group, and it's only amusing because so many of you pretend to be above that shit.
You really think nerds pretend to be above that? I don't. They just want the pecking order to be based on different criteria.
David Raup proposed that an environment that was too stable could lead to extinction when it finally changed. Organisms fed a diet of change will be able to adapt to change while those given a static environment will not. This isn't really an answer to your question (or even a proven theory), but relevant perhaps...
Environmental stress leads to changes in selective pressure (not in mutation)
Heat shock proteins, released during times of stress, can increase mutation rates. There are a number of types of environmental stress, outside of chemical or radiological insults, which can influence mutation rates.
This acts on the ongoing background (and relatively constant) mutation rate
I realize that some very respectable researchers have asserted a fairly constant mutation rate, but the hypervariable regions of viruses (along with other more conserved regions) seems to argue for some genetic control of the mutation rate, which might potentially be altered in the same way that genes are. A particular base mutating does not have to be equiprobable with another base mutating.
HIV can be detected in virtually everyone with AIDS.
HIV is not the only cause of severe immune suppression.
Starvation, for instance, can cause sufficient deterioration in the human immune system to meet the criteria of AIDS, minus the presence of HIV. This is relevant when looking at AIDS statistics from third world countries where determinations are made based on symptoms rather than viral load or antibiody reactivity.
To answer your question about "Western Blot", the virus HIV has a defect in it's error correction mechanism and is unable to ensure that it is not creating proteins to which the body has antibodies to. This means that if say there are a million copies of the virus.. a few thousand may be invisible to the anti-body while thousands more are susceptible to it. That's one of the reasons why AIDS cant kill off a person rapidly.
Another poster answered my question. The antibodies are responses to more stable internal structures of the HIV virus, rather than to the rapidly mutating viral coat.
>>Or that HIV works in tandem with another virus to cause AIDS. >A mystery virus that has escaped detection so far ?
Human Herpes Virus 8, the virus which causes Kaposi's sarcoma, has been identified for some time and it's link to AIDS patients is well documented. Of course, HHV8 is not required for AIDS so far as I know, but it certainly makes HIV much much worse.
I know that HIV weakens the immune system. HIV is ALSO an opportunistic infection. Compare HIV infection rates to somthing like chlamydia. HIV infection rates are miniscule by comparison. You typically need some other complicating factor like a genital sore, blood contact, etc to get HIV seropositivity.
Those who are most likely to die of HIV are those whose immune systems were already compromised; those who are starving, use drugs (even non-injected drugs such as amyl nitrates), or who are hemopheliacs.
You, or anyone with similar insights, should start a life insurance policy for people who have tested positive for HIV and who refuse to take any anti-viral medications.
To argue from Deusberg's view for a moment, he would say that HIV is a marker for other pathogens and immune suppressing behavior. People with HIV would still be likely to live shorter lives under either paradigm.
Not that anyone here is likely to start up a life insurance company any time soon, even if they could think up a novel business paradigm.
Thanks for answering my question re: the Western Blot test. That makes a lot of sense.
That the early tests on AZT were not so convincing is irrelevant;
It is relevant if you want to consider any epidemiological data which includes people being treated with AZT.
There is not a shred of a rational reason to doubt that HIV causes AIDS
Agreed. HAART therapy often has the effect of sending KS into remission, (even though the virus which causes KS is oddly not cleared more effectively after the introduction of HAART therapy.)
To argue from my standpoint for a moment rather than Deusberg's; HIV is not simply "the virus which causes AIDS" though it seems to do that. HIV is relativly weak when it starts out. Only a minority of infected needlesticks lead to seroconversion. Because of this, HIV is also a marker viruses for immunosuppresion. A person who seroconverts to HIV is likely to already have other illnesses, particularly HHV. The presence of HHV dramatically increases the time from seroconversion to full blown AIDS.
As for the idea that HIV may have evolved from a less dangerous human virus: This is not impossible in theory, but there is strong evidence that HIV originates from SIV, and no evidence for another origin. Also, the co-evolution of a virus with its host tends to make it less and not more harmful to the host; this is the trend that was observed for syphilis and has recently been reported for HIV as well. It is not in the interest of a disease to kill its host.
If you believe that syphilis was yaws before it was syphilis, then the pathogen became much more harmful as it became a sexually transmitted disease.
The notion that HIV came from SIV is predicated on the paradigm that you use for describing the evolution and virulence of infectious diseases. The current theory assumed from the beginning that HIV must have come from a different species and only considered evidence which fit that model.
If you use a different model for the evolution of infectious diseases, there is less need to describe HIV as coming from SIV.
A number of strains of HIV-2 have been identified, classified into four clades (A, B, C, D) which are no more closely related to each other than they are to different strains of an SIV (simian immunodeficiency virus) found in wild sooty mangabey monkeys in West Africa. http://www.aidsmap.com/en/docs/F8ABA3D3-E6A0-42AC- A801-8F06B6EBD4C7.asp
HIV-2 is significantly less virulent than HIV-1, the virus mostly responsible for the "AIDS epidemic." HIV-2 appears in the more socially stable and religiously conservative West Africa.
I'll outline Ewald's theory of infectious diseases breifly. If you review the existing evidence through the lense of that theory, it should be clearer why HIV does not have to have recently come from SIV in order to be an epidemic and why pathogens can sometimes increase in virulence.
The older views of the evolution of infectious diseases are based on the observation of airborne pathogens. There are several key differences between airborne and fluid borne diseases.
1. Airborne diseases benefit from a host that can walk around. If you stay at home, you're not spreading the cold.
2. Airborne diseases typically spread just one strain of the disease at a time.
3. Airborne diseases are typically suppressed quickly by the immune system. Even though Herpes Zoster, the virus which causes chicken pox, stays in your body for life you're only contagious for a small amount of time. So the virus only has a small window of time to spread.
However, the more of a host's resources that a virus can manage to use, the more transmissible it will be. Some of the worst flu pandemics occurred after poorly fed soldiers were being carted around Europe in boxcars during WWI. When people can be very sick and still move around and spread their sickness, it
How? If anything, syphilis is the exact opposite case; in its current form after countless generations of infecting people, it is less virulent and severe and more prone to latent infection.
Syphilis (according to some sources) existed as a non sexually transmitted disease prior to it's time as an STD, in the form of yaws. Yaws was much less virulent than syphilis. The rise of European cities and the resulting increase in promiscuous sex coincided with the rapid spread of syphilis. In other words, a change in human society influenced the nature of the STD which spread through it.
Currently, if Syphilis presents symptoms it's more likely to be cured by antibiotics. That's a bit of a complicating factor in its evolution since the most virulent forms would be treated. I'll detail Ewald's theory a little later today in a reply to another poster replying to my coment, to clarify things.
The guy's name is professor Peter Duesberg. I did a speech based on his book "Infectious AIDS, Have We Been Misled" 7 years ago when I was in college.
To start out with, Deusberg was a good scientist, making important discoveries regarding oncogenic viruses, and was consequently recipient of the NIH's "Outstanding Investigator" grant. Whether his theory is correct or not, what is certain is that he has been the subject of career assassination for political rather than scientific reasons, for his views in the early days of the AIDS crisis. It was essentially argued that dissent from the HIV=AIDS model would cause confusion and interfere with efforts to prevent the spread of HIV\AIDS. Deusberg's university treated him as a paraiah and his NIH grant was rescinded. Science cannot operate properly if opposing views are silenced for political reasons.
The nobel laureate you refer to is Kerry Mullis. Despite inventing PCR the guy is a self described nut and LSD user. I wouldn't put too much weight in his testimony. Mullis argues that the Viral Load test, based on PCR, is far less precise than it is claimed to be. I don't know if this is true or not.
While I'm not agreeing with Deusberg's hypothesis, like any dissident his criticisms have focused on weaknesses in the HIV-AIDS theory over the years.
Deusberg has made a number of very good points regarding HIV, which are only now starting to be considered. Among them;
HIV is an opportunistic infection. People most often become HIV positive because they engaged in some other activity which damages the immune system such as the use of certain drugs (such as amyl nitrates or injected drugs) or hemopheliacs. Even before the AIDS crisis, hemopheliacs still had a dramatically shortened lifespan and increased suceptibility to disease. Deusberg claims (and I would tend to question, but don't have facts on hand to refute) that the death rate for hemopheliacs does not indicate their being hit by a lethal epidemic during the time of the early AIDS crisis and that their lifespan has steadily increased. The fact that HIV is an opportunistic infection suggested to Duesberg that it could be a marker for another condition or conditions which causes immune suppression. (Hemopheliacs, even without HIV, are immune suppressed.) While Deusberg gives a general notion of an immune system collapsing under excessive strain, it seems that Human Herpes Virus 8, common to AIDS victims, has been shown to also cause immune suppresion. HHV8 is transmissible via saliva and probably acts synergistically with HIV to dramatically speed up the progression of the disease. HHV8 is the virus responsible for Kaposi's Sarcoma, a symptom previously attributed to HIV.
Azidothymidine or AZT, which has been shown to reduce HIV viral load, has side effects that are essentially identical to AIDS including immune suppresion. AZT has never been proven to increase lifespan in a reliable, controlled study. The infamous Concord Study which attempted to prove the benefits of AZT, was hopelessly flawed. Subjects receiving the drug were aware of it and shared their medicine with the control group to help them. AZT was a chemotheraputic agent for cancer which was discontinued due to its severe side effects sometime before the late '60s. It's approval for use against HIV essentially circumvented the normal FDA approval process, due to the crisis of its introduction. It has been argued that AZT prevents seroconversion to HIV positivity and I think it's still used for this purpose.
Finally, unrelated to Deusberg, the CDC seems to be working off an outdated model for the evolution of infectious diseases (Burnette and White's model) which was based on analysis of airborne infection rather than fluid borne infection, which seems subject to different pressures. B&W's theory suggests (incorrectly) that all lethal diseases will, in time, evolve to benign co-existance with their host. This is generally true for airborne diseases. B&W's theory demands that HIV be a virus that was newly int
Yes. That's the big problem with vouchers. Currently, special needs kids consume more resources than mainstream kids. Under a voucher program, they get fewer resources. The public schools currently assume a disproportionate level of this burden.
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all the jobs that require your physical presence are generally 'IT technician' jobs - pulling cat5 through walls, swapping out hard disks in PCs and that kind of thing - the lower paid end of the IT spectrum (although there are higher paid network engineering types of jobs).
There are still a lot of companies which value face to face communications. If you think that any IT job can be offshored, try getting a web programming job at a local community college on the other side of the US. Chances are, they'll want you to be onsite. Maybe that job will be offshored eventually, but for small and medium sized businesses, they want SOMEONE to physically show up at the office, eat lunch with their coworkers, etc. Maybe this desire is irrational, but there are some costs in terms of poorer communication which makes some offshoring more expensive.
Besides, very few good paying jobs of any kind technically require a person's presence. Look on the dark side of things. Why not have a doctor's office with a few nurses, a video setup, and some nice Philippine doctors on the other end. Samples can be sent off to foriegn labs. Same with teachers, as long as there's someone in the room to make sure people behave. Or do we only offshore those things where customers won't be immediately aware that the job is offshored? IT is not particularly less safe than most other jobs, if you want to take outsourcing to an extreme. The difference is that it tends to be more cutting edge than other fields, and the most exposed to innovation and change.
Well, the husband had the choice of breaking the law or saving his wife, and decided to save his wife. I see nothing wrong with that;
It's a mitigating circumstance, certainly. Would your opinion be different if the medicine cost $1,000,000 and the theif still left only $2000 (all he had?)
What if the medicine cost $10,000,000 to produce and $1 each to manufacture and was being sold at $1000 a pill.
The problem is, it's easier to enter into business where you're selling worthless junk than it is to enter into lifesaving fields like medicine. If you're selling worthless junk, noone cares if you overcharge, if you mess up, etc. In medicine, a person doesn't even start to break even financially until their early thirties at least. And if there's not enough incentive to make that sacrifice, you're going to have a doctor shortage. Which (surprise!) we do.
The HMOs trying to manage costs ought to be paying for people to go through medical school. It's that investment and commitment that they're essentially leaching off of.
My only beef against the drug industries are that they don't follow the rules. They put out misleading information (Searle was trying to argue that COX-1 served no function in adult humans because they were pushing Celebrex, a selective COX-2 inhibitor) or else they patent things that aren't theres (consider the history of AZT. Finally a Canadian company basically said 'the US patent is BS. We're making the stuff and if they want to sue us they'll lose. Not that AZT was a particularly wonderful drug. But I digress...)
And of course the best solution is publically funded socialized medical system where such situations simply won't happen, since the government pays for medicine and bread.
There aren't enough resources for everyone to receive the maximum standard of care. Just because it's government funded doesn't mean that it's free. There will always be trade offs between costs and benefits. And those with more money will be better positioned to procure resources.
You should study some quantum physics before you condescend to other people. You can have action at a distance faster than light, but you can't use it to transmit information.
If Zion wasn't a simulation, then how is it that Neo had his powers outside of the matrix? That seemed to clinch things for me.
Bear in mind, the cross that appears when Neo sacrifices himself is not the Christian cross. It's the gnostic cross. An even-armed cross inside a circle. It means somthing different than the Christian cross.
The term "sons of God" and "sons of men" can be found in the Old Testament near the beginning of Genesis shortly after Adam and Eve leave Eden. The hebrew "B'nai elohim" (Sons of God) can also be translated as "sons of the powerful."
But is isn't contrary to Jewish thought to say "we are all God's children." I don't know of anything in the old testament which claims that the Messiah is supposed to be Christos, a begotten son of God. Perhaps someone can enlighten me? That was more a notion in the pagan cultures, so far as I know, where decent from a deity affirmed a person's right to rule. Emperors proclaimed themselves divine or the children of Gods.
In orthodox Christianity, The holy spirit (also present in the Jewish faith as the portion of God which can be viewed/experienced by a living person) took form in Jesus.
Most likely the Hebrew Mechiach(annointed one) was translated into the greek Christos, and the meaning changed. Most of the claims about Jesus as a begotten son of God hail from the time of John long after Jesus's murder.
... was a lovely example of 'ad hominem.'
1. If you can organize groups, you will get more done than if you work solo. Look at manager's salaries compared to the majority of other professions.
2. Einstein did good work. But he never beat Kazaak. MMORPGs don't teach you how to be a good theoretical physicist.
Some players develop skills in planning.
3. Video games don't really teach planning and coordination. It'd be nice if they did. They may teach basic tactics, but the hallmark of nearly all games is instant gratification in various doses. No video game I've ever played made me any better at project management or scheduling. At best, they've helped to reinforce my understanding of 'just in time solutions.'
And I'm fine with that as long as my taxes aren't going to pay for things like medicare to pay for your diabetes or heart disease or whatever else you gave to yourself through your irresponsible eating/smoking/whatever habits.
Well, it's that or social security checks.
Socialism. You're damned if they do, and you're damned if they don't.
I don't claim to have the right to use legal coersion to tell people what to do. But if I had kids, I wouldn't want them using marijuana. I wouldn't buy it for someone. I wouldn't encourage anyone to use it. There are exceptions, of course. Some people with ADD seem to benefit from it. Some people take it medicinally. But believing in freedom doesn't mean I have to give up my ideas of what is beneficial or harmful to others. If a person is an Epicurian and believes that pleasure is the ultimate goal in life, it's fair to say to him, if you care about him, "in the long run, your behavior will bring more pain than pleausre and is not consistant with the value that you place on feeling good." The decision is still his (or hers) of course.
If a company includes ethical principles in its charter, it is legally allowed to consider things other than profits. This type of thing is rare, but it does happen.
There certainly moral and ethical corporations. But corporate morality and ehticality ends up getting framed in terms of greed. If a corporation pays its employees a good wage, it's assumed to get better or more loyal employees from this.
There's more of a compelling economic interest to allow cars than there is to allow cigarettes. If we banned cars, we'd do a lot of damage to people's livlihood. So we deal with the situation and there are laws to minimize the pollution done by cars, mandating catalytic converters and otherwise regulating emmissions.
There is not a right answer.
Maybe not in terms of ideology and formal logic, but some value systems produce healthier, happier communities than others. The best laws seek a balance between various interests.
I'd be fine with seeing weed legalized (and taxed) since I don't think stoners are a danger to others. There's not really any rational reason not to. Of course, I don't think people should use the stuff, but you have to have a good reason to impinge on what people do in the privacy of their own homes.
the only thing I like about Slashdot is the way you nerds have 'Lord of the Flies'ed yourselves into a pecking order like any other social group, and it's only amusing because so many of you pretend to be above that shit.
You really think nerds pretend to be above that? I don't. They just want the pecking order to be based on different criteria.
David Raup proposed that an environment that was too stable could lead to extinction when it finally changed. Organisms fed a diet of change will be able to adapt to change while those given a static environment will not. This isn't really an answer to your question (or even a proven theory), but relevant perhaps...
Environmental stress leads to changes in selective pressure (not in mutation)
Heat shock proteins, released during times of stress, can increase mutation rates. There are a number of types of environmental stress, outside of chemical or radiological insults, which can influence mutation rates.
This acts on the ongoing background (and relatively constant) mutation rate
I realize that some very respectable researchers have asserted a fairly constant mutation rate, but the hypervariable regions of viruses (along with other more conserved regions) seems to argue for some genetic control of the mutation rate, which might potentially be altered in the same way that genes are. A particular base mutating does not have to be equiprobable with another base mutating.
Your eating fast food doesn't give me diabetes.
I'm fine with laws that protect people from each other. I'm against laws that attempt to protect people from themselves. Seems simple enough to me.
at least smoking tends to kill quickly.
Emphysema and heart disease are slow enough.
HIV can be detected in virtually everyone with AIDS.
HIV is not the only cause of severe immune suppression.
Starvation, for instance, can cause sufficient deterioration in the human immune system to meet the criteria of AIDS, minus the presence of HIV. This is relevant when looking at AIDS statistics from third world countries where determinations are made based on symptoms rather than viral load or antibiody reactivity.
To answer your question about "Western Blot", the virus HIV has a defect in it's error correction mechanism and is unable to ensure that it is not creating proteins to which the body has antibodies to. This means that if say there are a million copies of the virus .. a few thousand may be invisible to the anti-body while thousands more are susceptible to it. That's one of the reasons why AIDS cant kill off a person rapidly.
Another poster answered my question. The antibodies are responses to more stable internal structures of the HIV virus, rather than to the rapidly mutating viral coat.
>>Or that HIV works in tandem with another virus to cause AIDS.
= Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=1597617 7&query_hl=1&itool=pubmed_DocSum
>A mystery virus that has escaped detection so far ?
Human Herpes Virus 8, the virus which causes Kaposi's sarcoma, has been identified for some time and it's link to AIDS patients is well documented. Of course, HHV8 is not required for AIDS so far as I know, but it certainly makes HIV much much worse.
From the cited article;
The results suggest that HHV-8 might be a cofactor for HIV progression and that HHV-8-infected endothelial cells might play a relevant role in transendothelial HIV spread.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd
First. HIV is NOT an opportunistic infection.
I know that HIV weakens the immune system. HIV is ALSO an opportunistic infection. Compare HIV infection rates to somthing like chlamydia. HIV infection rates are miniscule by comparison. You typically need some other complicating factor like a genital sore, blood contact, etc to get HIV seropositivity.
Those who are most likely to die of HIV are those whose immune systems were already compromised; those who are starving, use drugs (even non-injected drugs such as amyl nitrates), or who are hemopheliacs.
You, or anyone with similar insights, should start a life insurance policy for people who have tested positive for HIV and who refuse to take any anti-viral medications.
To argue from Deusberg's view for a moment, he would say that HIV is a marker for other pathogens and immune suppressing behavior. People with HIV would still be likely to live shorter lives under either paradigm.
Not that anyone here is likely to start up a life insurance company any time soon, even if they could think up a novel business paradigm.
Thanks for answering my question re: the Western Blot test. That makes a lot of sense.
That the early tests on AZT were not so convincing is irrelevant;
It is relevant if you want to consider any epidemiological data which includes people being treated with AZT.
There is not a shred of a rational reason to doubt that HIV causes AIDS
Agreed. HAART therapy often has the effect of sending KS into remission, (even though the virus which causes KS is oddly not cleared more effectively after the introduction of HAART therapy.)
To argue from my standpoint for a moment rather than Deusberg's; HIV is not simply "the virus which causes AIDS" though it seems to do that. HIV is relativly weak when it starts out. Only a minority of infected needlesticks lead to seroconversion. Because of this, HIV is also a marker viruses for immunosuppresion. A person who seroconverts to HIV is likely to already have other illnesses, particularly HHV. The presence of HHV dramatically increases the time from seroconversion to full blown AIDS.
As for the idea that HIV may have evolved from a less dangerous human virus: This is not impossible in theory, but there is strong evidence that HIV originates from SIV, and no evidence for another origin. Also, the co-evolution of a virus with its host tends to make it less and not more harmful to the host; this is the trend that was observed for syphilis and has recently been reported for HIV as well. It is not in the interest of a disease to kill its host.
If you believe that syphilis was yaws before it was syphilis, then the pathogen became much more harmful as it became a sexually transmitted disease.
The notion that HIV came from SIV is predicated on the paradigm that you use for describing the evolution and virulence of infectious diseases. The current theory assumed from the beginning that HIV must have come from a different species and only considered evidence which fit that model.
If you use a different model for the evolution of infectious diseases, there is less need to describe HIV as coming from SIV.
A number of strains of HIV-2 have been identified, classified into four clades (A, B, C, D) which are no more closely related to each other than they are to different strains of an SIV (simian immunodeficiency virus) found in wild sooty mangabey monkeys in West Africa.
http://www.aidsmap.com/en/docs/F8ABA3D3-E6A0-42AC- A801-8F06B6EBD4C7.asp
HIV-2 is significantly less virulent than HIV-1, the virus mostly responsible for the "AIDS epidemic."
HIV-2 appears in the more socially stable and religiously conservative West Africa.
I'll outline Ewald's theory of infectious diseases breifly. If you review the existing evidence through the lense of that theory, it should be clearer why HIV does not have to have recently come from SIV in order to be an epidemic and why pathogens can sometimes increase in virulence.
The older views of the evolution of infectious diseases are based on the observation of airborne pathogens. There are several key differences between airborne and fluid borne diseases.
1. Airborne diseases benefit from a host that can walk around. If you stay at home, you're not spreading the cold.
2. Airborne diseases typically spread just one strain of the disease at a time.
3. Airborne diseases are typically suppressed quickly by the immune system. Even though Herpes Zoster, the virus which causes chicken pox, stays in your body for life you're only contagious for a small amount of time. So the virus only has a small window of time to spread.
However, the more of a host's resources that a virus can manage to use, the more transmissible it will be. Some of the worst flu pandemics occurred after poorly fed soldiers were being carted around Europe in boxcars during WWI. When people can be very sick and still move around and spread their sickness, it
How? If anything, syphilis is the exact opposite case; in its current form after countless generations of infecting people, it is less virulent and severe and more prone to latent infection.
Syphilis (according to some sources) existed as a non sexually transmitted disease prior to it's time as an STD, in the form of yaws. Yaws was much less virulent than syphilis. The rise of European cities and the resulting increase in promiscuous sex coincided with the rapid spread of syphilis. In other words, a change in human society influenced the nature of the STD which spread through it.
Currently, if Syphilis presents symptoms it's more likely to be cured by antibiotics. That's a bit of a complicating factor in its evolution since the most virulent forms would be treated. I'll detail Ewald's theory a little later today in a reply to another poster replying to my coment, to clarify things.
The guy's name is professor Peter Duesberg. I did a speech based on his book "Infectious AIDS, Have We Been Misled" 7 years ago when I was in college.
To start out with, Deusberg was a good scientist, making important discoveries regarding oncogenic viruses, and was consequently recipient of the NIH's "Outstanding Investigator" grant. Whether his theory is correct or not, what is certain is that he has been the subject of career assassination for political rather than scientific reasons, for his views in the early days of the AIDS crisis. It was essentially argued that dissent from the HIV=AIDS model would cause confusion and interfere with efforts to prevent the spread of HIV\AIDS. Deusberg's university treated him as a paraiah and his NIH grant was rescinded. Science cannot operate properly if opposing views are silenced for political reasons.
The nobel laureate you refer to is Kerry Mullis. Despite inventing PCR the guy is a self described nut and LSD user. I wouldn't put too much weight in his testimony. Mullis argues that the Viral Load test, based on PCR, is far less precise than it is claimed to be. I don't know if this is true or not.
While I'm not agreeing with Deusberg's hypothesis, like any dissident his criticisms have focused on weaknesses in the HIV-AIDS theory over the years.
Deusberg has made a number of very good points regarding HIV, which are only now starting to be considered. Among them;
HIV is an opportunistic infection. People most often become HIV positive because they engaged in some other activity which damages the immune system such as the use of certain drugs (such as amyl nitrates or injected drugs) or hemopheliacs. Even before the AIDS crisis, hemopheliacs still had a dramatically shortened lifespan and increased suceptibility to disease. Deusberg claims (and I would tend to question, but don't have facts on hand to refute) that the death rate for hemopheliacs does not indicate their being hit by a lethal epidemic during the time of the early AIDS crisis and that their lifespan has steadily increased. The fact that HIV is an opportunistic infection suggested to Duesberg that it could be a marker for another condition or conditions which causes immune suppression. (Hemopheliacs, even without HIV, are immune suppressed.) While Deusberg gives a general notion of an immune system collapsing under excessive strain, it seems that Human Herpes Virus 8, common to AIDS victims, has been shown to also cause immune suppresion. HHV8 is transmissible via saliva and probably acts synergistically with HIV to dramatically speed up the progression of the disease. HHV8 is the virus responsible for Kaposi's Sarcoma, a symptom previously attributed to HIV.
Azidothymidine or AZT, which has been shown to reduce HIV viral load, has side effects that are essentially identical to AIDS including immune suppresion. AZT has never been proven to increase lifespan in a reliable, controlled study. The infamous Concord Study which attempted to prove the benefits of AZT, was hopelessly flawed. Subjects receiving the drug were aware of it and shared their medicine with the control group to help them. AZT was a chemotheraputic agent for cancer which was discontinued due to its severe side effects sometime before the late '60s. It's approval for use against HIV essentially circumvented the normal FDA approval process, due to the crisis of its introduction. It has been argued that AZT prevents seroconversion to HIV positivity and I think it's still used for this purpose.
Finally, unrelated to Deusberg, the CDC seems to be working off an outdated model for the evolution of infectious diseases (Burnette and White's model) which was based on analysis of airborne infection rather than fluid borne infection, which seems subject to different pressures. B&W's theory suggests (incorrectly) that all lethal diseases will, in time, evolve to benign co-existance with their host. This is generally true for airborne diseases. B&W's theory demands that HIV be a virus that was newly int
Facts, schmacts. You can use so-called facts to prove anything that's even remotely true.
D'oh!
Yes. That's the big problem with vouchers. Currently, special needs kids consume more resources than mainstream kids. Under a voucher program, they get fewer resources. The public schools currently assume a disproportionate level of this burden.