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Software To Improve AIDS Survival?
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Fri Aug 08, 2008 04:46 PM
from the math-saves-lives dept.
from the math-saves-lives dept.
Roland Piquepaille writes "There are more than 33 million people living with HIV worldwide. No cure or vaccine has been unveiled this week in Mexico during the International AIDS Conference. Still, European researchers have developed 'a predictive software system for HIV that could help extend the lives of victims of the killer disease.' The scientists working on the EuResist project have combined HIV databases in Italy, Sweden and Germany, creating what is probably the largest database on AIDS and HIV in the world. Armed with information about more than 18,000 patients, 64,000 therapies, and 240,000 viral mode measurements, the researchers have created new mathematical prediction models, which should soon be available to medical researchers and doctors all over the world."
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Predicting mutations? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Predicting mutations? (Score:4, Interesting)
But wasting EU subsidies on reinventing a fully functional wheel is probably better than wasting it on something disfunctional.
Parent
Re:Predicting mutations? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
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It's waste of money only if it's more expensive to buy the commercial product for EU-wide use... So I suspect it's not waste after all, but saving money.
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That would be my understanding as well. I believe early attempts at producing a vaccine tried to use de-activated HIV but it was actually able to reactivate itself, but you'd have to dig through the early work to get the low-down on that. The most recent efforts were abandoned the other week, with researchers being quoted as saying they had to go back to square one. NOT the simple problem as presented in Neuromancer! Despite claims to the contrary, there are no known examples of survivors and no known examp
Re:Predicting mutations? (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually said mutagenic properties could be used as a weapon against AIDS instead of trying to counter them.
Aids dies a few decades after the last uninfected human contracts it.
Think about it : mutations in the aids virus will mean longer survival for the carriers of the virus, which means more children, therefore more spreading of the virus. AIDS's evolution would have the same goal as human evolution : human survival.
Hey it's no crazier than carbon trading :-D
Parent
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Well, that would be true of just about any parasite -- killing the host is bad for business, if you can't find another one.
What you really need to understand (Score:5, Interesting)
about HIV is that it (currently) cannot be transmitted except by very personal means - which is to say, extremely intimate contact with an infected human being and/or injection of their bodily fluids directly into your body.
Until a mutated "airborne" variation of HIV occurs, the reality is that the vast majority of cases were entirely preventable. While research into how to "treat" the disease is good, actual research into better methods of preventing infection to start with is just as important - both in a medical and sociological sense.
For one example: the US's frighteningly high incidence of AIDS in female blacks is due almost entirely to promiscuous, non-monogamous bisexual black males [nytimes.com] who've been infecting a large portion of the female black population over the past few decades. Efforts to combat this and get the men to use condoms and regularly get tested - and to stop having sex after they know they are infected - have run into walls in black culture. The problems in Africa in this regard are even worse, with some men actually believing that the "cure" for aids is to have sex with a virgin - and then going and raping young girls, emotionally scarring them for life as well as infecting them.
If AIDS is going to be combatted, medicinal "cures" and "treatments" are half the battle - they do nothing against the spread of the disease if you can't also convince at least a majority of the infected to stop engaging in activities that will spread it.
Parent
Education? (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course I am a proponent of education being the best way to eradicate AIDS or bring it to a manageable level. There will always be people who will contract it in a truly unpreventable manner. However, in most cases a little caution or healthy set of habits will reduce this dramatically. Reduction in anal sex (2/3 male aids cases are homosexual [cdc.gov]), prolific unprotected sex, and sharing needles are just some off the top of my head. We arent telling people who they can be partners with and we aren't saying they are wrong.
Of course how do we bring education of this matter to countries were literacy is a luxury?
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Re:Education? (Score:5, Informative)
Many if not most of those countries that have the greatest AIDs infections rates have an cultural attitude against condoms, want a woman's vagina to be dry so that it's more pleasurable to the man (I don't get that one), and all in all, have patriarchal societies where women are second class citizens - if one at all.
There's also ignorance too.
We can develop the best drugs in the World and give them away but, I'm afraid, it may not have much of an effect in places like Africa.
Parent
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Many if not most of those countries that have the greatest AIDs infections rates have an cultural attitude against condoms
Not really. They just haven't completed primary education, are illiterate and may not even know what a "virus" is. They believe in witch doctors and think raping a virgin will cure the illness.
On of the greatest problems in Africa is how you teach people how to use a condom to protect against aids, since the population can't read and do not understand bacteria or viruses.
If you call illi
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it may not have much of an effect in places like Africa.
It would, however, have a significant effect here -- and for anyone coming here from Africa.
When did we start trying to fix the rest of the world first? Change starts at home. (Regime change starts at home, too.)
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Education is pointless when the gay community is beset with people that feel AIDS is just something that happens to you. I'm not saying the folks with the "gift giving" [nih.gov] and "bug chasing" mindsets are all that common, but come on! Treating it with privacy, secrecy and protection isn't sensible either - people that have it can spread it, and they do. Sometimes intentionally.
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Why aren't we doing that?
Political correctness and sensitivity, I bet. It would be very easy to round up and sanitize all the AIDS patients: something like random saliva checks followed by a reversible chemical castration and a discrete implant/ankle bracelet. It could be done rather inconspicuously, combined with an employee urine test, during a breathalyzer traffic stop, or at a DMV photoshoot :)
But I just don't think most people would go for it. In particular, even though many AIDS victims did "deserve it" by having consentual p
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Of course, we could treat it like any other VD - require the doctors to report incidents to Public Health officials, have the Public Health people get a list of sexual partners from th
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What does this do for countries without a health care system where aids is rampant?
Exactly the same thing as any eventual cure will do for them ... absolutely nothing, as a real cure for HIV/AIDS is the holy grail of pharmaceutical profits for years to come.
The best they can hope for is Robotussin (thanks to Chris Rock for this suggestion).
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What? It's not 2/3a, it's about half.
A non-Education based way to "cut" AIDS (Score:3, Interesting)
it's already funded [washingtonpost.com] and being offered as a solution
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Surely it would just mean that it would take 70% longer for everyone to become infected ?
I remember watching a documentary once on AIDS, and one particular African guy who KNEW he had the disease but had embarked on a quest to hump every female that moved anyway.
With that kind of mentality, you are just prolonging the inevitable.
Education will not work with people that are uneducatable.
Prevention will not work in a country where there are a million other nasty ways to die (starvation, genocide, Rober Mugabe
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Circumcision [bbc.co.uk] cuts the chances of contracting aids by 70% during a single sexual encounter. Now this doesn't mean that a man running around practicing unsafe sex is 70% less likely to contract aids, as it would be just a matter of time, but if all the men were circumcised the effect of a single infected woman sleeping around would be a lot less.
it's already funded [washingtonpost.com] and being offered as a solution
That's great and changes one exponential curve ... into another exponential curve.
Let's say the uncircumscribed chance of infection of a single encounter is 100% and circumscribed is 30%. Let's also say that people have sex with the same person 10 times and then move on. And let's say people have 5 sexual partners in their lives. The chance of AIDS getting passed with 100% certainty is 100%, the chance with 30% is ... 99.9999940951%. Oh great ... So you can imagine the difference this makes ...
(I'm assuming
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Re:Education? (Score:4, Funny)
Not education, software. I know of one particular piece of preventative software that has saved nearly 10 million people from contracting HIV, Chlamydia, gonorrhea, Crabs, Herpes, etc..
Its called "World of War Craft".
Parent
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Tax everyone into oblivion to create massive, feel-good education programs that politicians can use to fool people into thinking the politicians are human, and watch them fail to work because the *real* problem is that people just don't give enough of a shit to change their ways.
Me? Cynical? Damned right!
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Any culture that doesn't adapt is a culture that will die out. Just like in nature, if a species cannot adapt, it will die out.
AIDS knows no boundary within the human race. Africans, Americans, Chinese, Japanese, etc..everyone is vulnerable. We will either adapt, as a race and as humanity, or we will die out.
Some cultures don't want to adapt, so some cultures are in clear danger of being wiped out.
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I said: "2/3 male aids cases are homosexual" as a pointer to anal sex. So rather than reading what you want to read maybe you need to generate a level of tolerance before you get in trouble again.
But yes I have several gay male friends and fear for their health due to this disease.
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You are trying to make this an ethical debate and I am not going to get into that.
I simply pointed out that anal sex is a common way to contract hiv, I do not know of any studies that are accurately showing the method of contracting hiv as a person could have had several partners and tried several positions before learning that they were HIV infected. Therefore the best pointer that I know of to this is the
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The wording of your post as a little odd. I had to read is several times to realize you did not making an anti-gay statement.
The position really isn't a factor , it's the gay culture.
Homosexuals would seldom wear a condom, and person zero had homosexual 'engagement'.
Those number are leveling out. Lat I looked, young girls (teens) were the fastest growing segment getting AIDS.
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That is interesting....do you have links to that study? I can look on goggle I guess. It makes sense though, with the growing abstinence culture some girls are starting the belief that anal sex doesn
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My tip (Score:4, Funny)
if (location == africa)
goto anywhere_else
The Truism Remains (Score:2)
What a hacking target... (Score:2)
Next step...demonization of the infected.
Yahoo!
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Didn't they make a movie about that? I think it was called 28 Weeks Later [imdb.com]. Or maybe it was 28 Days Later [imdb.com]. Maybe it was I Am Legend [imdb.com]. Oh, now I remember, it was Quarantine [imdb.com].
Seriously, what is with all the movies about disease that turn people into raging demons?
hmmm (Score:1, Insightful)
Don't tell me (Score:1)
Install Norton and hope it doesn't decide to update while you are driving.
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Worried about updates? Shouldn't you be more worried about.. I dunno, Norton running? Although it could be a cure -- you wouldn't have enough resources available to "run" the disease...
21M people have died of AIDS... (Score:1)
Re:21M people have died of AIDS... (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, the vast majority of AIDs cases are in the third world, where they probably don't have access to databases. Or doctors.
Parent
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Getting the proper amount of people for anything scientific is hard. The number is "low" for a number of reasons (actually, I see it as pretty high):
- There's rigorous screening or information collection, which is a big deterrent.
- It has to be voluntary to ally with ethical guidelines, hence everyone has to "opt in" and sign.
- There is limited compensation since the money has to go to actual science.
- There is limited compensation to deal with a huge number of resources.
- That's a combination of only thre
Aids survival? (Score:3, Funny)
Wait. Why do we want AIDS to survive?
"Still," (Score:2)
You know you're reading a news article when a sentence begins with:
Still, ...
typical ignorant slashdot replies (Score:2)
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Re:Statistics (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
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I'll admit I help perpetuate this. I'm more worried about AIDS than hunting with Dick Cheney. I'm not gay or very promiscuous, I use protection, and I get tested regularly, but it's still incredibly worrisome to my generation. AIDS has been around as long as we have, and you're still SOL. Chris Rock is right.
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I'm sorry but you're a moron. Nowadays the life expetancy of a 20 year old diagnosed early with HIV is as high as 49 years in some countries. Without treatment it is measured in single digits. In addition people on antiretroviral drugs are dramatically less likely to transmit the disease to others than those who are not. I'd argue that you have fuck all idea what you are talking about and that you hence ought to shut up.