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Two Women Found With HIV-Immune Mutant Gene
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interlard - vt., to intersperse; diversify -- Webster's New World Dictionary Of The American Language
Immune (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Lucky ladies! (Score:2, Insightful)
Except from all the other potentially fatal STDs you can catch.
Re:Lucky ladies! (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed! Now all they have to worry about is...
Gohnorrea
Herpes
Chlamydia
Syphillis
G
HPV
Hepatitus
Trichomoniasis
and more! Lucky bitches...
Darn! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Lucky ladies! (Score:5, Insightful)
and pregnancy. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Genetics at work? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:It seems unlikely. (Score:3, Insightful)
The only way to be immune, then, is for the white blood cells not to attack the virus, or even be in the area of it. The natural self-destruct system in the cells will eventually trigger. Provided the self-destruct triggers faster than the virus can spread, the body would be guaranteed to win.
Or, you could have white blood cells that HIV has difficulty attaching to. No attack vector means that HIV never gets a chance to do its work.
Re:Immune (Score:2, Insightful)
Not being a racist troll here, but from my experience, culturally Asians seem to be a lot less promiscuous, which would imply that this disaster doesn't seem so imminent.
Re:Lucky ladies! (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it would be totally awesome if some kind of imaginary god did try and punish it's creation through the use of a cruel, life destroying virus - only to have his divine will deflected by something so simple as a tiny thicknesses of latex, education, testing and screening, as well as the hard work of doctors and scientists around the globe.
Would me wonder who should be quaking in fear from who.
Re:Immune (Score:4, Insightful)
This is not true, Keep in mind the vector that spreads aids is sex 1 guy gets it from the side, has sex with his wife and maybe a little more on the side and four people are infected.
As for Asian culture's its no more or less sexual than American culture some are more strict than others. Until after the Korean war it was quite common for men to keep second families, even now many still do despite modern stigmas..
Re:Spontaneous mutation? (Score:4, Insightful)
You really are a twit!
Think about the logic...here, I'll help.
Change (mutation) in person A.
Person A is now immune to Disease B.
Person A can't be infected by the disease.
This is good!
Wow, imagine that! It changed for the good!
Now...
Change (mutation) in person C.
Person C is now a huge risk for Disease D, gets Disease D.
Person C dies of Disease D.
The changes are not passed on... (This is the opposite of bad, or in other words: good)
Wow! ANOTHER `change` for the good!
This was a generalized version.
It takes us millions of years to develop frontal lobes, because there are millions of changes. Every single one of us has a mutation of some type, it's just that some of the mutations don't manifest themselves.
Now, ideally, you understood this. If you didn't, good luck with the rest of your life.
Not that simple (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Tell me it ain't so ! (Score:1, Insightful)
Of course this is almost definately a joke, so why this got modded insightful is beyond me. That's what the funny mod is for... sheesh.
Re:Tell me it ain't so ! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Tell me it ain't so ! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Tell me it ain't so ! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Tell me it ain't so ! (Score:5, Insightful)
Stupid Question (Score:3, Insightful)
To fight off the flu, you essentially give someone the flu, you just only give them a small amount. (And it's usually "dead," so that it can't infect them.) The body 'learns' to defend against it, so that if the 'full strength' flu hits, you can prevent it. This is a basic fact of how most preventative immunizations work.
Why doesn't this work for HIV/AIDS? Wouldn't someone receiving a tiny bit of the AIDS virus become immune to AIDS? I'm assuming that someone much smarter than myself has attempted this, and that it doesn't work. I'm just curious as to why. (And, as I said, I don't pretend to know much about HIV, AIDS, or medicine in general.)
Re:and pregnancy. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Genetics at work? (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps you could explain how this observation works with the fact that the most virulent New World disease (Syphilis) managed to spread like wildfire from Catholic Spain at the height of the Inquisition, throughout European society. And while you're at it, perhaps you could explain how it was still a significant and common disease at the height of the Victorian period.
Maybe I'll save you the effort. Both Syphilis and HIV/AIDS were enabled by revolutions in *Human Mobility*, not changes in morality. The syphilis epidemic erupted at the same time that commerce via ship hit a spike, and HIV/AIDS hit us when air travel spiked.
It's no surprise that 'Patient Zero' in the US HIV/AIDS outbreak was an airline steward. It *is* a coincidence that he happened to be gay.
Re:God and science (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Lucky ladies! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Tell me it ain't so ! (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it is time to officially retire the term "third world" since hardly anyone has a clue what it means and keeps making up their own definitions. I have to admit that including a communist country with nuclear weapons is the most imaginitive inclusion in the "third world" I've yet to see.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_world [wikipedia.org]
Isn't it ironic?
Re:Lucky ladies! (Score:1, Insightful)
Misinformative (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Genetics at work? (Score:3, Insightful)
Riiight. Like a flu epidemic is indicative of a human desire to breathe and interact with other human beings. Or the Black Plague was indicative of a desire for human beings to live in cities and coexist with rats.
AIDS is a disease, not a punishment.
Max
Re:Genetics at work? (Score:3, Insightful)
No, it's a disease, pure and simple. And if you want to wander down the road of genetic viability, consider this: it makes far more sense for a woman to have each of her children by different men, than by one man alone. Which hardly supports your argument.
And 'fornication', as you put it, doesn't promote the spread of HIV. It would be 'fornication without using a condom' that risks the individual. Use the condom and the risk disappears.
Max
Doesn't mean much in itself (Score:3, Insightful)
In other other words the mutation might stop you dying in childhood from malaria, only to see an increased chance that you die painfully in adulthood. The mutation is only semi-recessive so even if you get it from one parent you will exhibit some symptoms. If you're really unfortunate however, both parents will pass on the mutation to you in which case you're really screwed.
From the DNA's perspective the mutation is still successful since it means a greater chance of reproducing (over the more malaria prone normal gene pool). But it it's not so great for the individual whose natural defence against malaria could see them die painfully and prematurely in either case.
So the fact that there is a gene that grants increased immunity to HIV is meaningless unless it has no other sideeffects. If these women consequently die of breast cancer or something else as a result of it, it could hardly be said to be a 'miracle cure'.
Re:Tell me it ain't so ! (Score:3, Insightful)
There was a time in the past (maybe only 15-20 years ago) when African countries had 1% HIV and N % starvation (for some large value of N), look at them now.
Re:Patents are the real key (Score:5, Insightful)
Cite?
(Yes, I know not believing everything you read is genereally bad for the karma. So mod me down).
Re:Tell me it ain't so ! (Score:3, Insightful)
Yea, it's not the bullet that kills you...it's the sudden displacement of brain matter to nonfunctional locations (such as all over the wall). What you are saying makes perfect sense.
Re:um, no (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not as interesting as it sounds... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It may not be relative (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Genetics at work? (Score:3, Insightful)
-Don't cheat
Keep on being faithful for 90-18=72 years. Don't cheat on your partner for three thousand seven hundred fourty-four weeks and weekends.
You are not married and you didn't have a long-term relationship yet, did you? One side of the relationship always becomes dull and passive, while the other partner becomes more active and dominant. Observed this in my own and many other relationships from friends. If you are the passive partner, no problem, just enjoy a solitary hobby or cuddle and hug your partner to death. Passive partners are happy enough to be around their partner, live with them and for them. If you're the active partner, wait for years for the next sexual activity, die from pure and severely hurting boredom, search a geeky niche hobby and disconnect from society or engage in extra-marital relationships.
Sounds harsh, but that's the way it is. Unless both partners happen to like the same almost-solitary hobby or a miracle of love happens, one of the partners is invariably bound to be bored by all that cuddly-fluffy relationship stuff. Once the process started, you have a positive feedback problem going on as the passive partner retreats into him/herself, into his/her hobbies or develops an unnatural and potentially unhealthy servitude for his partner. All that while the active partner, more and more assured by unquestioning love *and* tethered at the same time is facing the problem of feeling guilt for doing social (harmless) activities without his/her partner or ending up doing everything with him/her. The active partner then decides by gut feeling for one of the two ways, leading him/her to a intensively private relationship, having only the partner and at max two or three very similar couples as his/her friends and contact OR having "the bird waiting at home" while engaging in a circle of friends distinct from his/her partner, leading to encounters, flirts and sexual activity with like minded people from that circle or meeting new ones.
Having your social activity reduced to 5 persons at max, living intensely intimate and solitary OR having to deal with changing relationships and frequent feelings of guilt or life- and self-breaking decisions "leave current long-time partner for a possibly very short new interesting flirt that hurts in the end" or "sleep around, bury conscience and be a bad person" - not funny for anyone.
The partner that is more possible to leave the other is the active one. Are you the active or passive partner? Find out now:
Do you have fear your partner's gonna leave some day? Is it impossible to do too many activities in common with your partner? Passive!
Do you feel trapped in endless cuddling? Is the idea of having activities without the partner enticing on this fact alone? Active!
Feel free to comment on that, but perfect relationships are mostly described by "passive" partners that cannot imagine one on one life may NOT be sufficient for anyone
A broad and false assumption may be, that social activity without and in a different circle of friends of the partner ultimately leads to potential sexual attraction, but that's what I witnessed more often than not.
Humans are not built to be happy, but to reproduce. - dunno who said this, but it is sadly true, trust me.
Re:Not as interesting as it sounds... (Score:3, Insightful)
Many homosexuals have been married and had children out of societal pressures. Also, as another poster pointed out, it could be a recessive gene and as such a straight-as-an-arrow heterosexual could still be carrying it.
I think the truth lies in a more complex set of factors - partly rooted in genetics, and partly rooted in environmental and developmental factors. I think very little lies in "lifestyle choice".
Re:Tell me it ain't so ! (Score:5, Insightful)
In Africa there are massive cultural and practical barriers in place. It is much much harder to transmit this information widely, and there are strong cultural biases against abstinence/protection. The most sickening cultural belief is that having sex with a virgin cures you of AIDS. This is especially bad because between the long standing beliefs and the fact that people are sexually active younger there, the only virgins are very young children or babies. It's fairly horrifying.
It will take a lot of time, effort and money to bring the AIDS crisis under control in Africa. President Bush was wise (for once) to commit billions to fighting the problem there. He was also wise to recommend that the program have an abstinence element to it. The Uganda program that contained an abstinence element was unusually successful in fighting AIDS in that country. I only wish he had lived up to his commitment by actually funding it at the level he promised.
My parents spent the last 3 years living in Lesotho (the country inside of S. Africa), so they've spent a lot of time discussing this with the local Peace Corps volunteers. It is fairly discouraging, but very important that we do something about it.
Re:Back at ya, monkey's uncle. (Score:3, Insightful)
Creationists have no problem with evolution on this level. What they have a problem with is that evolution can account for the development of different species, or that it somehow allows a puddle of goo somewhere in France to became human.
It is perfectly reasonable to be critical about that sort of thing, even though it's often more a statement about the ignorance about biology of those Creationists than about deficiencies of the theory, and well, everything isn't completely explained yet, that is of course true.
What's ridiculous though, is that those Creationists then suddenly claim that some "God" created all of this, a theory for which the evidence is completely absent and therefore the gaps are infinitely larger... At least Evolution tries to actually explain things and thus be a scientific theory at all.
AIDS, Africa, & Aid (Score:2, Insightful)
Decades ago, the native African population existed in a state of equilibrium with nature. Part of that equilibrium entailed each woman (polygamy was--and actually is--common) birthing up to 9 infants in order to ensure at least one surviving to adulthood.
Then comes the Western do-gooder, apalled at the poverty, infant mortality, disease, non-existent medical care, and food shortage. Aid from Western countries poured in. Now the indigenous population had means to thrive and grow. Problem was (and is), women continued to birth up to 9 infants--but most if not all survived. The population exploded then spiked--then came another form of AID, nature's way of restoring equilibrium in an environment taxed beyond carrying capacity.
The spread of AIDs will never stop in backward African countries so long as the population remains ignorant. Promotion of condom use? "Don't you know the mzungu (white man) puts the AIDs in the condoms?" Abstinence? What a joke.
The only "cure" for AIDs (for now, at leaset) is education. Problem is, the educatee must want to be educated. It is hard to battle against several millenia of tradition and superstition.
Re:Patents are the real key (Score:5, Insightful)
The human race is going to be the first race in history to litigate itself into oblivion.
Re:Tell me it ain't so ! (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm so angry about your short rant that I could spit. (And shame on you moderators.) But instead of throwing a fit, I'm going to spell it out for you very clearly starting with the most aggrecious of your claims:
Having been HIV+ for three years, and expecting to be so for the rest of my (possibly short) life, as I'm sure and expert like you is so aware, HIV and AIDS are two medical conditions. I expect to be free from the symptoms of AIDS for at least another ten years. Your comments here expose a profound misunderstanding of how HIV works, immuno reponse works, and the variety of drugs that can keep HIV/AIDS folks out of the red zone for a very long time. Indeed is was true 20 years ago that HIV meant extreme immuno vulnerablility but that is no longer the case.
And for being an expert, somewhere along the way you, apparently, missed the class on medical ethics in which you would have learned that the central edict of medicine is increasing the quality of life for its recipients.
I don't know what kind of Nazi fantasy world you live in but there is no way in hell you are going to put me under house arrest 'for my protection' so that you feel safer when you don't know where your children are or who they are doing. The very notion that we can social engineer sexual exposure out of our society is nieve at best and disturbed at worst.
It sounds like you've been reading so Christian-right pro-abstainance bullshit. Your analogy fails in two ways:
Re:tard (Score:1, Insightful)
A little out of line I think... I do not wish problems on anyone, but with as with most actions, sex carries risks.
If you decide to view sex as a recreational sport of pleasure then you take the risks of that choice. Becoming or getting someone pregnant, possible receiving and spreading sexually transmitted diseases for example.
Believe what you will, but if sexual promiscuity didn't exist, then we wouldn't have this problem.
*NOTE* I am aware that it is also transmitted by sharing needles, bad blood transfusions and blood exposure. However I do not believe these are the major carriers of the diseases.
Re:Tell me it ain't so ! "... bush was wise..."??? (Score:2, Insightful)
While there is no doubt that GWB is religiously biased in favor of abstinence only crap, that doesn't mean that abstinence hasn't helped in other countries.
I refer you to:
This story about Uganda and abstinence [healthfinder.gov]
This Kristof article [profileafrica.com]
It does mention that 1/3 of the money committed goes to abstinence programs, which may be too much as a percentage, but a) these programs have a history of working in conjuction with other programs, and b) in a dire situation like this, it's better to have $3 billion that is as effective as $2 billion than just spending $1 billion.
Bush is a disagreeable ideologue, and he is overcommitted to many crap ideas, but that doesn't immediately discount funding for abstinence AIDS programs.
Also, I believe, although I can't point to something that immediately backs it up, that they have trouble getting people to regularly take the AIDS cocktail when it is offered. I truly wish that the West would get off it's ass and force drug companies to license/produce generic AIDS drugs for distribution in Africa, but it is unlikely to happen, and even so, there are still major cultural barriers to overcome.
The problem is that we view the health problems of Africa through Western eyes. With so many people dying young from a variety of illnesses, we can afford to allow them to do things that we find disagreeable to protect themselves. For instance, allowing/selling them DDT for their homes to prevent malarial mosquitos from infecting them.
Re:Darn! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Tell me it ain't so ! (Score:2, Insightful)
In any case, it is a given fact that HIV could be wiped from the face of the earth in one generation. The real question is, would you still engage in sex with the person if you knew they were HIV+? Condoms may lower the rate of transmission, but it's not a magic sheath that will offer infallible protection. It's like skydiving without a reserve parachute...you'll probably be safe...but it only takes one thing to go wrong and it's all over.
My 2 cents.
Re:Tell me it ain't so ! (Score:3, Insightful)
Most HIV infection cases come from preventable activity, such as unprotected sex or drug use without sterilized needles. Rare are those who are infected through a accidental needlestick or blood transfusion. We have to get people to get condoms before they have sex. Because you are right in assuming that most people want sex. We have to accomodate nature, but this can be done through safer sex.
Furthermore, most infected people with HIV do not know that they are infected for a while. The initial symptoms are flu-like. Then nothing happens, basically, until they come down with AIDS, which is a catch-all term meaning when symptoms present, such as secondary infections, etc.
In the meantime, they are continuing those activities that got them infected, such as drug use, unprotected sex, etc. These are all preventable infections, as you admit. They could wear condoms, they could bleach their needles. There is a moral dimension that seems to interject itself here, but ignore that and look at the essential fact: most infected people were doing risky things and they will continue doing it. Does this mean they deserve it? No. Does it mean they are not stricken with a contagious, deadly plague? No.
What are we going to do? Medicine can only treat HIV, not cure it. The majority of the infected will eventually die of AIDS, not with AIDS. Society should not hold its breath waiting for a cure for the disease. It has to be socially removed from circulation.
Why shouldn't we isolate those with HIV infections? Again, this sounds like flamebait, but think about it. We isolated lepers and smallpox and polio victims because we had to save lives. We had to sacrifice the ill to save the healthy. Political correctness did not matter in face of this crucial need to save the lives of the young. Remember what we did for SARS and West Nile and the hantavirus, in terms of isolation in the United States. Consider that HIV/AIDS is essentially a hundred percent lethal.
However, HIV/AIDS has been seen as a "gay" illness that causes it to be treated differently from other deadly plagues. There is nothing further from the truth; it is a human problem that cuts across all facets, gay and straight, black and white, men and women. It kills. It spreads. Period. It should be treated as such. Testing should be mandatory and then we should isolate the infected.
Is this cruel? Of course. Is it inhuman? I would say so. But the politically correct alternative is to allow those with HIV/AIDS to keep spreading it and kill more people. Because they will not stop. Most do not know they are infected. They got infected not because they were terrible people, but they got infected because they were doing risky things. They are likely to continue these acts. They have to be stopped. That this somewhat aligns itself with religious thoughts on morality is an unfortunate intersection. On a purely utilitarian scale, a strong argument can be made to isolate the sick.
Is this a "Nazi-fantasy world"? No. In a fantasy world, we would not get sick. But we do not live there. We live on this place called Earth where innocents die. Sacrifices have to be made. So while we can promote social change, people will never do what is necessary to truly remove AIDS from society.