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Trokair writes "China Daily reports that researcher Tuofu Zhu has discovered two women in an HIV Research program that are immune to the disorder via a mutant gene."
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How much reliability is in this discovery? Is it being independently verified? Is China once again reporting something falsified as part of their inferiority complex?
On the other hand, if this is for real, how much chance is there for this gene replicating? Human evolution may be happening in front of our very eyes!
Are there any known negative effects from this mutation? I'm envisaging something like sickle cell anemia here.
About ten years ago, I did volunteer work for an HIV-testing clinic. I met two men while I was there who were convinced that they were both HIV-immune. One had been very sexually active during the late 70s and early 80s and had had most of his friends and sexual partners die of AIDS-related causes, and the other had repeatedly had sex with multiple HIV-positive partners out of survivors guilt. Talk was just beginning around then of people who seemed to be immune to HIV.
It's not something I'd especially want to gamble on, though - HIV mutates nearly every time it infects, and at some point I think these people who are now immune won't be immune any longer.
Well, we are a very capable species. We will not die off easily. Aids/HIV are dangerous and deadly to us. It was just a matter of time before our own bodies figured out how to survive this virus. We have a good package to work with.
Just my first thoughts on the subject. I would like to know more about the study.
How I was reflecting on Gibsons Virtual Light over my morning coffee this morning and now I hear about the mutant gene that practically fulfills Gibsons prophecy regarding the therapy.
Personally, I would undergo genetic therapy and have my chioldren (when/if I have them) undergo such a therapy if made available. I think this particular finding an excellent example of how far the field of genetics has gone and the promise it shows. The flip side of course being the perils of falling into the Nazi idealism of creating a master race from a genetic template considered desirable.
It was just a matter of time before our own bodies figured out how to survive this virus.
I don't think that's exactly the case. HIV is only twenty-five years old, which certainly isn't enough time for genetic evolution to take place (especially considering the relatively slow reporductive rate of humans).
It's more likely they've an odd mutant gene that by coincadence makes them immune to the virus.
I swear I saw a documentary on PBS about how a tiny percentage of mostly european descendants are immune and it was because of the Black Death (or Bubonic plague, I'm not sure that those are the same thing.) But googling for answers lead me to
this article [healthfinder.gov] which says that 10-15 percent of northern europeans have limited immunity due to inheriting 1 resistant gene and 1% inherited the gene from both parents giving them full immunity. And Swedes have the highest percentage. Also it says the Plague is debunked and suggests the everpresent Smallpox as the culprit.
The most widely held conspiracy theory about HIV and AIDS is that they actually found a cure years ago, but Big Pharma makes more money selling the AZT "drug cocktail" than they would make selling the cure. An independently discovered cure would probably make everything go shitstorm.
The main story and your post put me in mind of a particular episode of "Secrets of the Dead" that I saw, exploring the plague and its survivors.
I wonder if either of those fellows could have been carriers of the delta 32 gene, a mutated form of the gene CCR5:
"In 1996, research showed that delta 32 prevents HIV from entering human cells and infecting the body"
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/case_plague/
I didn't see in the article anywhere where it mentioned which gene was affected in the Chinese women, but it seems like to be a different one, based on the information presented in the "Secrets" show:
"O'Brien assembled an international team of scientists to test for the presence of delta 32 around the world. "Native Africans did not have delta 32 at all," O'Brien says, "and when we looked at East Asians and Indians, they were also flat zero." In fact, the levels of delta 32 found in Eyam were only matched in regions of Europe that had been affected by the plague and in America, which was, for the most part, settled by European plague survivors and their descendents."
It was a really good show and if you get the opportunity to watch it, I highly recommend that you do.
Growing up, not too long into adolescence a friend of our family died of complications due to AIDS. I was barely 14 at the time and it struck me how dangerous AIDS really is. For years people used to think that my having no desire to fuck around like most of my peers was that I was gay. Then occassionally I'd let slip the story about our friend it just floored them. The scariest part is that they could have had HIV at the very moment they were thinking, after my telling that story, "but that can't happen to me."
What really struck me was that we saw the guy only about 3-4 months before he died. He was about as healthy as I am now at 21, and I workout on a regular basis. Then a few months later, *BOOM* dead of complication caused by AIDS. The scariest thing about the disease is that you can go without knowing you have it until the last minute.
They probably simply lack the necassary receptors (t-5?) on their white blood cells for the virus to attack. Probably nothing more than that - most of the vaccinness/treatments now adays are focusing on those areas since if they are blocked the virus can't attach itself.
Not to be harsh, but you can get the same thing with heart problems. I mowed lawns in high school - one afternoon I mowed the lawn of a little old lady. That night, my dad came home and said that she had just died of a heart attack. She looked fine that afternoon, but that night she was dead.
Same goes for any kind of cancer - it can insidiously grow in you until there's nothing you can do about it but waste away and die.
Probably going to burn some karma with those comments, but it's a terrible disease that they're working on. I hope they find a cure and kick its ass - same for cancer - but it's just another way to die.
In other words, you must have a pathetically weak immune system (or none at all), and your body's cells must be so fragile that any abnormality of any kind will destroy them instantly.
A small fraction of people seems to be resistant to HIV infection because they carry idiosyncratic mutations that interfere with the way the HIV virus works. That doesn't mean they have a "pathetically weak immune system"; in fact, such mutations generally have no known effects at all other than conferring HIV resistance. Furthermore, resistance of some fraction of the population to specific viruses is a common occurrence.
But, hey, if that's what these two women want for their life, that's their problem.
WTF is that supposed to mean? One of the women in question was exposed to HIV from her husband, who was infected through a blood transfusion. It's bad enough that bigoted right wingers confuse stupidity and carelessness (unprotected sex) with immorality, but now people like you even consider accidentally getting a tainted blood transfusion a lifestyle choice and a moral failing?
I think you demonstrate just how absurd your kinds of views are, and the blithering nonsense that preceded it showed how uninformed you are.
I would be cautious about such reports. Firstly, time and time again such claims are made about particular vaccine or group of people. There was even a case where promitent scientists were so convinced that they have created an attenuated HIV strain as a vaccince candidate, that they were ready to test it on themselves. Fortunatly, cooler heads prevailed and spared them from what was later shown to be a disaster.
As was mentioned before, the virus mutates rapidly and a single gene mutation can protect you for so long until virus finds a revertant mutation. So those ladies better not go and have too much fun, thinking that they are immune:)
Finally, this is not such a rare occurance to have certain protective mutations. Lots of people in Africa are certainly more resistant to HIV. However, unless a combination of those mutations is used in lets say anti-HIV gene therapy (which there is not much chance of) they are not very useful directly.
... Calling AIDS a disorder is a bit of a misunderstanding....
Homosexuality isn't, as far as research can tell, genetic. It seems to be caused by conditions within the mother's womb, which causes the brain to develop in a slightly different way.
I assume by this you're referring to the federal government's "ban" on certain types of research, such as stem cell reasearch... only there is no such ban. You can do all the research with any type of stem cells you want (including those from aborted fetuses) and not break a single law... you just can't do it using money from the federal government.
While whether or not such research should have access to federal funds is debatable (and I'd probably agree that the current regulations are too restrictive), it's a far cry from actually banning such research.
One useful statistic that I've never come across is the relative ammounts of research funding spent in the U.S. by private vs. public/government sources.
by Anonymous Coward writes:
on Wednesday October 06, 2004 @11:34PM (#10456648)
A mutation that seems to prevent AIDS progression has been known for a while. [sciencentral.com] There's a very small number of people who are HIV-positive but do not develop AIDS symptoms, even over decades. The mutation seems to inhibit the process that causes T-cell death. This small group is very heavily studied.
Early this year, some work at Rockefeller University looked promising, but then came a retraction. [rockefeller.edu]
A lab technique problem made the results look better than they were. Work continues to try to unscramble this mess. Because there are so few people showing this kind of immunity, it's hard to figure out what's really going on.
These people are benign carriers; i.e. they can infect others. This isn't like a vaccine response.
Surely this is just the process of natural selection.
Cast aside the concept of gene manipulation and mass media to inform people of the risks of HIV, and you would end up with some of the population immune and living, and the rest dead.
Therefore the human race would have evolved to be immune to HIV.
So back to genes and media, have we evolved so far that we are further helping evolution, or are putting it at risk by stopping natural selection?
Of course, but 25 years is little more than a single generation - an effective selection process would likely take many thousands, especially since HIV is not an instant kill and susceptible persons may live to have children.
Like other posters have mentioned, from the time of the Black Death / Bubonic plague which was devastatingly effective, less than 1% of the population involved now has immunity from that particular infection.
It's interesting that the mutation has been found in the Asian population, but I'm concerned that the article places an emphasis on ideas of race, which has been an obsolete scientific term since genetic research in the 1940s and 50s.
Race and the idea of race have are not medical ideas. The reason why so many Europeans (not merely Caucasians) have one or two copies of the mutant gene is because of the bottle neck of the black plague throughout Europe. It afforded them some or cmplete resistance to it. It is entirely possible that the Chinese people found to have the gene may have these ancestors themselves. As Chinese "asians" are just as much a mix of people from different places as "caucasians".
There is no scientific basis for ideas of race whatsoever - we are all homo sapiens.
Of all the genes in human being, about 75 per cent are identical in every person; only 25 per cent vary from person to person. And of that variable amount, 85 per cent of the difference would be present even if the two people were fairly closely related; that is, an ethnic subgroup, like Norwegians. Another 9 per cent of the genetic variation will result from individuals being members of separate nations or tribes within a "race"--a Spaniard and an Italian, for example. And only about 6 per cent is the result of the two people being from what we call separate races. Any person's race accounts for only about 0.24 per cent (or 6 per cent of 25 per cent) of his genetic make-up. Info taken from here [sunysb.edu].
I saw a show on PBS that discussed the Plague and how some medievals didn't die when infected. It then went to discuss a gay man who was HIV resistant. the guy must've felt like a highlander - all his friends kept dying off and he expected to die off also but though infected with HIV it never
The key is the fact the Gene patens have blocked research into it. Every time a lab does something with the caucasian mutation this lab send out a cease and desist. They guy who they found it on originally is opposed to it, but he has no say, even if it is his body. Another thing software and genes have in common, neither should have patents.
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.
This absolutely could be the case. And yet I'm sure it isn't.
Businesses will do anything to make a buck. Companies routinely overlook blatant safety hazards that put their customers' lives on the line.
But I think if someone had cured AIDS, they'd go forth with it, if nothing else so they could claim they cured AIDS. I think if a big pharmaceutical came out tomorrow with a (credible) claim at having cured AIDS, their stock would go through the roof.
0.0000000000000214/nucleotide/generation multiply that by 3 billion nucleotides in a human
------------------
0.0000642
70 year lifespan = 365 70-day cycles.
(so 0.0000642 x 365)
------------------
0.0243433
1 (person) divided by 0.0243433
------------------
4.1
So 1 mutation every 4 peoples entire lives, with a "most of the time it does nothing at all", sure doesnt look like a lot of evolution just whizzing past us to me...
Of course I'm just computing numbers without fact checking and maybe missing something.
And virtually everyone has one form of HPV or another.
Last I heard, there were over 90 strains, and several are common on even non sexually-active folks.
HPV transmits through skin contact, so rubbers won't prevent it. But the VAST majority of the time it does NOTHING, no warts, no cancers, NOTHING. Certain combinations of strains seem to cause the warts, and that's far less common than having no symptoms at all.
Overall, I think there's a LOT of fear mongering about STDs. The problem is really much more prevalent amongst the poor and uneducated. If you pick your partners right, and 'look before you leap' you have pretty good chances of coming out OK. It's good to get your partner to prove no infection before you hit it raw though, and you should go 'get swabbed' every year or so.
Also remember, there are less than 100,000 women with HIV in the United States. Your chances of sleeping with an HIV-infected female pickup in the USA is about 1 in 1500. Your chances of CONTRACTING HIV from that would be under 1 in 30,000. For non-junkie heterosexual men seeking women in the USA, your chance of being infected with HIV is almost nothing. Worry about the nasty STDs instead.
Just curious, then, where does that put bisexuals?
No one knows, but it doesn't seem to be linked to morphological differences in the brain. And I doubt we'll find out any time soon, since bisexuals are generally treated as deviants by both hetero- and homosexuals (except when it's part of some straight guy's "bi-babe" fantasy).
Actually, I once saw a show on PBS where some scientists did a clever test. They took a whole bunch of photographs of people's faces and morphed them together, to create a picture of a composite human face. Most people who saw the face and were asked whether it was an attractive person agreed that it was.
The idea here is that what the scientists did was create a completely average face -- that is, mathematically average. Faces with big noses, or big chins, or buggy eyes, were cancelled out by the majority of faces that didn't share those features. In the end, what you got was a face every feature of which was the "norm" for the human race at large.
So the conclusion you could draw from this study is that the people we find the most attractive are the ones with the least apparent variation. A particularly exaggerated feature on a face might be viewed as a sign that some radical genetic divergence has taken place in that person's development -- and we don't care much for that, as a species. While diversity might be good for evolution, we like the norm (and this has nothing to do with skin color or the facial features of any particular ethnicity; so far as I know the scientists used a whole cross-section of people).
So if this theory is true, then no, human standards of beauty are not actually as relative as romantics might assume.
by Anonymous Coward writes:
on Thursday October 07, 2004 @03:16AM (#10457646)
depending on who you want to believe (research CAN BE political) homosexual behavior is present in all mamals.
i chock it up to sexual orientation, like other human mind attributes, being full of deviance (used in the scientific, not religious sense). i took a sociology class where we were taught that sexuality isn't black and white -- there are stops all along the way. some people's sexuality is very hetro, some are slightly attracted to some members of their own sex, some are homo and some are asexual -- not sexually attracted to anyone. throw in varying levels of sexual desire and you have quite a diverse range of sexualities.
sadly, it's a subject where some ancient beliefs still hold sway.
there is the obvious evolutionary argument against but if you consider sexuality as a spectrum, this argument is diminished a bit (a mainly homo individual could be attracted to the occasional hetero partner).
then perhaps, you could consider non-reproducing mutations as beneficial to the survival of a species -- non-reproducing individuals can help a society in other ways. for example, homosexuality doesn't mean lack of desire to care for young. but it limits the chances of that individual having their own children. so a homosexual individual could be an assett in a society where child rearing is done by everyone.
remember: computers are binary, humans are analog.
by Anonymous Coward writes:
on Thursday October 07, 2004 @04:37AM (#10457861)
And this is a direct, unedited, yes I RTFA quote:
"Before, such mutant genes were only found in Caucasians. The finding has encouraged us to do further research in China, with the aim of developing medicines to prevent and cure HIV/AIDS for different races,"said Zhu. "
So 'before', when white-people, like myself, had this gene and it was identified and being considered, it wasn't REALLY studied that hard. But now that a Chinese person has it, they're going to study it?
Nice.
If you substitute the word Caucasion for blacks or hispanics, there would be cries of racism from any other ethnic group:
"Before, such mutant genes were only found in Blacks."
"Before, such mutant genes were only found in Hispanics."
This is not a major story. It is just meant to be a local story. For
example, see this 2002 story: Secrets of Aids
'immunity' [bbc.co.uk]. Here is a quote, "Scientists have known since the mid-1980s
that some people with HIV do not go on to develop Aids."
-- Bush borrows [brillig.com] money to kill Iraqis [iraqbodycount.net]. 140 billion borrowed [costofwar.com]. With interest, you pay
200 billion. When Saudis attack, invade Iraq?
Take the Bubonic Plague, for example. It had the potential to destroy humanity, due to the lack of technology, specifically the knowledge of how it was transmitted.
Coincidentally, there is a correlation [bbc.co.uk] between the distribution of this mutant gene in populations and the bubonic plague. It is speculated that its high concentration in Caucasians is a result of it's ability to resist the black death.
This is not news. There is a small but significant population in Africa that is immune to AIDS despite having HIV. They can pass along the infection to those who are not immune, but they themselves are completely unaffected. Last I heard, they're estimating this population in the most infected areas of Africa to hover around 0.5%.
We've known about these people since the 80s. This is not news. If someone figures out how to flip that gene in regular people so everyone's immune, then we're talking...give it/. real estate. Short of that...not interested.
by Anonymous Coward writes:
on Thursday October 07, 2004 @05:38AM (#10457990)
Herpes and HPV are hardly even noticed anyway. Only about a tenth of the people who have genital herpes ever notice it. Almost *everyone* has HPV. Symptoms on both reveal more about a troubled immune system than actual infection.
STDs calm down to asymptomatic pretty quickly because an obviously symptomatic person has trouble with both reproducing and spreading the disease. People vulnerable to the disease don't breed, strains of the disease that are too obvious have the same problem, and boom.
This, more than penicillin, is why syphillis isn't the problem it used to be. It was awful in 1890, but a hundred years before it was horrifying. These days, even when untreated, the symptoms rarely cause a problem. People die before they hit the neuropathy.
Not being a racist troll here, but from my experience, culturally Asians seem to be a lot less promiscuous,
But you're talking about an exponential process. If everybody has unprotected sex with n persons while being infected, as soon as n > 1, the actual value of n matters very little: the disease will spread with catastrophic speed. It might take more time to infect the whole population, but not that much.
As an example, if in one case the process spreads with multiplicative factor n1 = 2, and in the other n2 = 8, then it will only take 3 times as long for the first process to infect as many people. If n1 = 2 and n2 = 16, it will be 4 times as long.
The ratio between total infection times is equal to the ratio of the logs of the two multiplicative factors. You can check by yourself, it's just basic logarithm / exponent manipulation.
Of course in this simplistic analysis we ignore repetitions (people already infected do not contribute to any further increase in infections). But these effects become significant only when a sizeable proportion of the population is infected, so essentially if one population is small and the other is large, the disease will spread faster, for a longer time, in the second one.
Oh, btw, remember that in the case of India and China put together, we are talking about one third of mankind.
But there is an even more depressing aspect of AIDS. With AIDS, abstinence is only a protection if it is absolute. There are some populations in which such a thing exists. Most of the time it is enforced by scaringly oppressive traditions / religions / customs. In other words, when AIDS becomes widespread enough to have a significant impact on the population, it turns obscurantism into a Darwinian advantage.
Unfortunately, the children would have to be homozygous for the allele in question to benefit much from it.
Not necessarily. If inherited from only one parent, they may be fully immune, resistant but not immune, or may have no benefit.
In some cases, carrying the trait is better than fully expressing it. This is the case for sickle cell anemia. Carrying the trait confers resistance to maleria. Fully expressing it is,of course, a bad thing. This is thought to explain the prevalance of sickle cell anemia amongst people in areas where maleria exists. Perhaps the evolutionary advantage of the maleria resistance outweighs the increased chance of having children with sickle cell.
Well one theory is this...
After studying penguines it was notice they too have a substantial gay population. These gay penguines mated for life, like other penguines. Also, heterosexual penguines would sometimes have young and abondon them. So, the gay penguines would pick up the abandoned young and care for them.
So the theory goes like this: The homosexuals might be there so that they may adopt unwanted / orphaned young.
I don't really know what it means to be 'immune' to HIV, but I can tell you there are a large number of highly qualified scientists out there who either question the very existance of the HIV virus or whether or not HIV is capable of causing AIDS. These are not your normal run of the mill Internet whack-jobs with a pet conspiracy theory. A good place to start is http://www.aliveandwell.org/, click the "Rethinking AIDS" link.
This site was founded by Christine Maggiore, a married, heterosexual white women (not the normal risk group), who has tested positive for the 'HIV' virus in 1992. At first she became an AIDS activist, but as she delved deeper into AIDS/HIV research she began to question everything she though she knew about the virus and the disease, and wrote a book about her findings. She calls into question the accuracy of the HIV test, the assumption that HIV causes AIDS, and the efficacy/safety of anti-retroviral drugs.
Today, over 12 years after her diagnosis, she takes no anti-retroviral drugs, and is in perfect health. She has had two healthy children since her diagnosis, and refuses to test or treat either of them for HIV. She actively campaigns for mother's rights to refuse the HIV test and AIDS drug treatments for themselves and their children.
Don't just assume that the mainstream scientific beliefs about HIV and AIDS are correct. Do some research on your own. Google 'AIDS dissidents' and 'Rethinking AIDS'. There is a lot out there. Judge for yourself.
some countries in africa the possibility of contracting HIV during your lifetime is now nearly 100% for teenagers.
Whats sad is this is a preventable disease. There is so much misinformation going around in africa about the disease that know one knows how to easy it is to prevent it. The most disturbing being if you have sex with a virgin, you will be cured of HIV. Thousands of young girls each year are raped on that information alone.
There is a distinct difference between preventable diseases and curable diseases. In my opnion we should put more focus on preventing the disease than we do now. Its similar to how the US and other countries are now launching large scale infomercials on smoking. A cure to cancer and HIV would be wonderful one day but we can do something right now to prevent people from exposing themselves to both.
The black plague theory about Delta 32 is questionable. Two published studies (one by me, in fact) have shown that it is not very plausible that the bubonic plague caused enough natural selection to have produced the modern day frequencies of the Delta 32 mutation in Europe. However, it is nearly certain that something did exert strong natural selection on Delta 32 in order for it to be at its current frequency. The leading contender would be some infectious disease (e.g. smallpox), but probably not plague.
Spontaneous mutation? (Score:2, Interesting)
On the other hand, if this is for real, how much chance is there for this gene replicating? Human evolution may be happening in front of our very eyes!
Are there any known negative effects from this mutation? I'm envisaging something like sickle cell anemia here.
Re:Spontaneous mutation? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not something I'd especially want to gamble on, though - HIV mutates nearly every time it infects, and at some point I think these people who are now immune won't be immune any longer.
Genetics at work? (Score:5, Interesting)
Just my first thoughts on the subject. I would like to know more about the study.
Virtual Light (Score:5, Interesting)
What a coincidence... (Score:3, Interesting)
Personally, I would undergo genetic therapy and have my chioldren (when/if I have them) undergo such a therapy if made available. I think this particular finding an excellent example of how far the field of genetics has gone and the promise it shows.
The flip side of course being the perils of falling into the Nazi idealism of creating a master race from a genetic template considered desirable.
Re:Genetics at work? (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think that's exactly the case. HIV is only twenty-five years old, which certainly isn't enough time for genetic evolution to take place (especially considering the relatively slow reporductive rate of humans).
It's more likely they've an odd mutant gene that by coincadence makes them immune to the virus.
1 More Reason to Find Swedish Women Hot (Score:5, Interesting)
Conspiracy theory (Score:1, Interesting)
Delta 32 (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder if either of those fellows could have been carriers of the delta 32 gene, a mutated form of the gene CCR5:
"In 1996, research showed that delta 32 prevents HIV from entering human cells and infecting the body"
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/case_plague/
I didn't see in the article anywhere where it mentioned which gene was affected in the Chinese women, but it seems like to be a different one, based on the information presented in the "Secrets" show:
"O'Brien assembled an international team of scientists to test for the presence of delta 32 around the world. "Native Africans did not have delta 32 at all," O'Brien says, "and when we looked at East Asians and Indians, they were also flat zero." In fact, the levels of delta 32 found in Eyam were only matched in regions of Europe that had been affected by the plague and in America, which was, for the most part, settled by European plague survivors and their descendents."
It was a really good show and if you get the opportunity to watch it, I highly recommend that you do.
I hope this is true (Score:3, Interesting)
What really struck me was that we saw the guy only about 3-4 months before he died. He was about as healthy as I am now at 21, and I workout on a regular basis. Then a few months later, *BOOM* dead of complication caused by AIDS. The scariest thing about the disease is that you can go without knowing you have it until the last minute.
Re:Immune (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:It seems unlikely. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I hope this is true (Score:5, Interesting)
Same goes for any kind of cancer - it can insidiously grow in you until there's nothing you can do about it but waste away and die.
Probably going to burn some karma with those comments, but it's a terrible disease that they're working on. I hope they find a cure and kick its ass - same for cancer - but it's just another way to die.
otherwise completely normal (Score:5, Interesting)
A small fraction of people seems to be resistant to HIV infection because they carry idiosyncratic mutations that interfere with the way the HIV virus works. That doesn't mean they have a "pathetically weak immune system"; in fact, such mutations generally have no known effects at all other than conferring HIV resistance. Furthermore, resistance of some fraction of the population to specific viruses is a common occurrence.
But, hey, if that's what these two women want for their life, that's their problem.
WTF is that supposed to mean? One of the women in question was exposed to HIV from her husband, who was infected through a blood transfusion. It's bad enough that bigoted right wingers confuse stupidity and carelessness (unprotected sex) with immorality, but now people like you even consider accidentally getting a tainted blood transfusion a lifestyle choice and a moral failing?
I think you demonstrate just how absurd your kinds of views are, and the blithering nonsense that preceded it showed how uninformed you are.
Caution would be advised. (Score:1, Interesting)
As was mentioned before, the virus mutates rapidly and a single gene mutation can protect you for so long until virus finds a revertant mutation. So those ladies better not go and have too much fun, thinking that they are immune
Finally, this is not such a rare occurance to have certain protective mutations. Lots of people in Africa are certainly more resistant to HIV. However, unless a combination of those mutations is used in lets say anti-HIV gene therapy (which there is not much chance of) they are not very useful directly.
Re:Not as interesting as it sounds... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Darn! (Score:5, Interesting)
While whether or not such research should have access to federal funds is debatable (and I'd probably agree that the current regulations are too restrictive), it's a far cry from actually banning such research.
One useful statistic that I've never come across is the relative ammounts of research funding spent in the U.S. by private vs. public/government sources.
This is the "long-term non-progressor" issue (Score:1, Interesting)
Early this year, some work at Rockefeller University looked promising, but then came a retraction. [rockefeller.edu] A lab technique problem made the results look better than they were. Work continues to try to unscramble this mess. Because there are so few people showing this kind of immunity, it's hard to figure out what's really going on.
These people are benign carriers; i.e. they can infect others. This isn't like a vaccine response.
Natural Selection at Work - Darwin would be happy (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Genetics at work? (Score:2, Interesting)
Like other posters have mentioned, from the time of the Black Death / Bubonic plague which was devastatingly effective, less than 1% of the population involved now has immunity from that particular infection.
Re:Eat it, creationist fuckwads (Score:3, Interesting)
Doesn't that also cause cancer?
No such thing as race in science (Score:3, Interesting)
Race and the idea of race have are not medical ideas. The reason why so many Europeans (not merely Caucasians) have one or two copies of the mutant gene is because of the bottle neck of the black plague throughout Europe. It afforded them some or cmplete resistance to it. It is entirely possible that the Chinese people found to have the gene may have these ancestors themselves. As Chinese "asians" are just as much a mix of people from different places as "caucasians".
There is no scientific basis for ideas of race whatsoever - we are all homo sapiens.
Of all the genes in human being, about 75 per cent are identical in every person; only 25 per cent vary from person to person. And of that variable amount, 85 per cent of the difference would be present even if the two people were fairly closely related; that is, an ethnic subgroup, like Norwegians. Another 9 per cent of the genetic variation will result from individuals being members of separate nations or tribes within a "race"--a Spaniard and an Italian, for example. And only about 6 per cent is the result of the two people being from what we call separate races. Any person's race accounts for only about 0.24 per cent (or 6 per cent of 25 per cent) of his genetic make-up.
Info taken from here [sunysb.edu].
they're not the first (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Not as interesting as it sounds... (Score:3, Interesting)
Sexuality is a long gamut of values...a simple 2, 3, or even 4-block characterization is too general.
Patents are the real key (Score:5, Interesting)
Back at ya, monkey's uncle. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Conspiracy theory (Score:3, Interesting)
Businesses will do anything to make a buck. Companies routinely overlook blatant safety hazards that put their customers' lives on the line.
But I think if someone had cured AIDS, they'd go forth with it, if nothing else so they could claim they cured AIDS. I think if a big pharmaceutical came out tomorrow with a (credible) claim at having cured AIDS, their stock would go through the roof.
Re:Genetics at work? (Score:4, Interesting)
0.0000000000000214/nucleotide/generation
multiply that by 3 billion nucleotides in a human
------------------
0.0000642
70 year lifespan = 365 70-day cycles.
(so 0.0000642 x 365)
------------------
0.0243433
1 (person) divided by 0.0243433
------------------
4.1
So 1 mutation every 4 peoples entire lives, with a "most of the time it does nothing at all", sure doesnt look like a lot of evolution just whizzing past us to me...
Of course I'm just computing numbers without fact checking and maybe missing something.
But HPV is more prevalent than GW are (Score:4, Interesting)
Last I heard, there were over 90 strains, and several are common on even non sexually-active folks.
HPV transmits through skin contact, so rubbers won't prevent it. But the VAST majority of the time it does NOTHING, no warts, no cancers, NOTHING. Certain combinations of strains seem to cause the warts, and that's far less common than having no symptoms at all.
Overall, I think there's a LOT of fear mongering about STDs. The problem is really much more prevalent amongst the poor and uneducated. If you pick your partners right, and 'look before you leap' you have pretty good chances of coming out OK. It's good to get your partner to prove no infection before you hit it raw though, and you should go 'get swabbed' every year or so.
Also remember, there are less than 100,000 women with HIV in the United States. Your chances of sleeping with an HIV-infected female pickup in the USA is about 1 in 1500. Your chances of CONTRACTING HIV from that would be under 1 in 30,000. For non-junkie heterosexual men seeking women in the USA, your chance of being infected with HIV is almost nothing. Worry about the nasty STDs instead.
Re:Not as interesting as it sounds... (Score:5, Interesting)
No one knows, but it doesn't seem to be linked to morphological differences in the brain. And I doubt we'll find out any time soon, since bisexuals are generally treated as deviants by both hetero- and homosexuals (except when it's part of some straight guy's "bi-babe" fantasy).
Max
It may not be relative (Score:5, Interesting)
The idea here is that what the scientists did was create a completely average face -- that is, mathematically average. Faces with big noses, or big chins, or buggy eyes, were cancelled out by the majority of faces that didn't share those features. In the end, what you got was a face every feature of which was the "norm" for the human race at large.
So the conclusion you could draw from this study is that the people we find the most attractive are the ones with the least apparent variation. A particularly exaggerated feature on a face might be viewed as a sign that some radical genetic divergence has taken place in that person's development -- and we don't care much for that, as a species. While diversity might be good for evolution, we like the norm (and this has nothing to do with skin color or the facial features of any particular ethnicity; so far as I know the scientists used a whole cross-section of people).
So if this theory is true, then no, human standards of beauty are not actually as relative as romantics might assume.
Re:Not as interesting as it sounds... (Score:1, Interesting)
i chock it up to sexual orientation, like other human mind attributes, being full of deviance (used in the scientific, not religious sense). i took a sociology class where we were taught that sexuality isn't black and white -- there are stops all along the way. some people's sexuality is very hetro, some are slightly attracted to some members of their own sex, some are homo and some are asexual -- not sexually attracted to anyone. throw in varying levels of sexual desire and you have quite a diverse range of sexualities.
sadly, it's a subject where some ancient beliefs still hold sway.
there is the obvious evolutionary argument against but if you consider sexuality as a spectrum, this argument is diminished a bit (a mainly homo individual could be attracted to the occasional hetero partner).
then perhaps, you could consider non-reproducing mutations as beneficial to the survival of a species -- non-reproducing individuals can help a society in other ways. for example, homosexuality doesn't mean lack of desire to care for young. but it limits the chances of that individual having their own children. so a homosexual individual could be an assett in a society where child rearing is done by everyone.
remember:
computers are binary, humans are analog.
Did anyone catch this facist quote? (Score:2, Interesting)
"Before, such mutant genes were only found in Caucasians. The finding has encouraged us to do further research in China, with the aim of developing medicines to prevent and cure HIV/AIDS for different races,"said Zhu. "
So 'before', when white-people, like myself, had this gene and it was identified and being considered, it wasn't REALLY studied that hard. But now that a Chinese person has it, they're going to study it?
Nice.
If you substitute the word Caucasion for blacks or hispanics, there would be cries of racism from any other ethnic group:
"Before, such mutant genes were only found in Blacks."
"Before, such mutant genes were only found in Hispanics."
Long Live ANON
This is not a major story. (Score:3, Interesting)
This is not a major story. It is just meant to be a local story. For example, see this 2002 story: Secrets of Aids 'immunity' [bbc.co.uk]. Here is a quote, "Scientists have known since the mid-1980s that some people with HIV do not go on to develop Aids."
--
Bush borrows [brillig.com] money to kill Iraqis [iraqbodycount.net]. 140 billion borrowed [costofwar.com]. With interest, you pay 200 billion. When Saudis attack, invade Iraq?
Re:Tell me it ain't so ! (Score:5, Interesting)
Take the Bubonic Plague, for example. It had the potential to destroy humanity, due to the lack of technology, specifically the knowledge of how it was transmitted.
Coincidentally, there is a correlation [bbc.co.uk] between the distribution of this mutant gene in populations and the bubonic plague. It is speculated that its high concentration in Caucasians is a result of it's ability to resist the black death.
Re:Immune (Score:3, Interesting)
This is not news. There is a small but significant population in Africa that is immune to AIDS despite having HIV. They can pass along the infection to those who are not immune, but they themselves are completely unaffected. Last I heard, they're estimating this population in the most infected areas of Africa to hover around 0.5%.
We've known about these people since the 80s. This is not news. If someone figures out how to flip that gene in regular people so everyone's immune, then we're talking...give it /. real estate. Short of that...not interested.
Not even particularly bad (Score:1, Interesting)
STDs calm down to asymptomatic pretty quickly because an obviously symptomatic person has trouble with both reproducing and spreading the disease. People vulnerable to the disease don't breed, strains of the disease that are too obvious have the same problem, and boom.
This, more than penicillin, is why syphillis isn't the problem it used to be. It was awful in 1890, but a hundred years before it was horrifying. These days, even when untreated, the symptoms rarely cause a problem. People die before they hit the neuropathy.
Re:Immune (Score:5, Interesting)
But you're talking about an exponential process. If everybody has unprotected sex with n persons while being infected, as soon as n > 1, the actual value of n matters very little: the disease will spread with catastrophic speed. It might take more time to infect the whole population, but not that much.
As an example, if in one case the process spreads with multiplicative factor n1 = 2, and in the other n2 = 8, then it will only take 3 times as long for the first process to infect as many people. If n1 = 2 and n2 = 16, it will be 4 times as long.
The ratio between total infection times is equal to the ratio of the logs of the two multiplicative factors. You can check by yourself, it's just basic logarithm / exponent manipulation.
Of course in this simplistic analysis we ignore repetitions (people already infected do not contribute to any further increase in infections). But these effects become significant only when a sizeable proportion of the population is infected, so essentially if one population is small and the other is large, the disease will spread faster, for a longer time, in the second one.
Oh, btw, remember that in the case of India and China put together, we are talking about one third of mankind.
But there is an even more depressing aspect of AIDS. With AIDS, abstinence is only a protection if it is absolute. There are some populations in which such a thing exists. Most of the time it is enforced by scaringly oppressive traditions / religions / customs. In other words, when AIDS becomes widespread enough to have a significant impact on the population, it turns obscurantism into a Darwinian advantage.
Thomas-
Re:If they were male (Score:3, Interesting)
Unfortunately, the children would have to be homozygous for the allele in question to benefit much from it.
Not necessarily. If inherited from only one parent, they may be fully immune, resistant but not immune, or may have no benefit.
In some cases, carrying the trait is better than fully expressing it. This is the case for sickle cell anemia. Carrying the trait confers resistance to maleria. Fully expressing it is,of course, a bad thing. This is thought to explain the prevalance of sickle cell anemia amongst people in areas where maleria exists. Perhaps the evolutionary advantage of the maleria resistance outweighs the increased chance of having children with sickle cell.
Re:Not as interesting as it sounds... (Score:2, Interesting)
not just science (Score:3, Interesting)
There is no scientific basis for ideas of race whatsoever - we are all homo sapiens.
Nor any basis in Christianity (note the "one blood" part):
http://bible.gospelcom.net/cgi-bin/bible?language= english&version=KJV&passage=acts+17%3A26&x=0&y =0 [gospelcom.net]
Questionning the AIDS hypothesis (Score:3, Interesting)
This site was founded by Christine Maggiore, a married, heterosexual white women (not the normal risk group), who has tested positive for the 'HIV' virus in 1992. At first she became an AIDS activist, but as she delved deeper into AIDS/HIV research she began to question everything she though she knew about the virus and the disease, and wrote a book about her findings. She calls into question the accuracy of the HIV test, the assumption that HIV causes AIDS, and the efficacy/safety of anti-retroviral drugs.
Today, over 12 years after her diagnosis, she takes no anti-retroviral drugs, and is in perfect health. She has had two healthy children since her diagnosis, and refuses to test or treat either of them for HIV. She actively campaigns for mother's rights to refuse the HIV test and AIDS drug treatments for themselves and their children.
Don't just assume that the mainstream scientific beliefs about HIV and AIDS are correct. Do some research on your own. Google 'AIDS dissidents' and 'Rethinking AIDS'. There is a lot out there. Judge for yourself.
Re:Tell me it ain't so ! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Tell me it ain't so ! (Score:2, Interesting)
some countries in africa the possibility of contracting HIV during your lifetime is now nearly 100% for teenagers.
Whats sad is this is a preventable disease. There is so much misinformation going around in africa about the disease that know one knows how to easy it is to prevent it. The most disturbing being if you have sex with a virgin, you will be cured of HIV. Thousands of young girls each year are raped on that information alone.
There is a distinct difference between preventable diseases and curable diseases. In my opnion we should put more focus on preventing the disease than we do now. Its similar to how the US and other countries are now launching large scale infomercials on smoking. A cure to cancer and HIV would be wonderful one day but we can do something right now to prevent people from exposing themselves to both.
plaugue theory questionable (Score:2, Interesting)