Software To Improve AIDS Survival? 97
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."
Re:Education? (Score:0, Interesting)
What does this do for countries without a health care system where aids is rampant?
It is a lost cause. There are too many aids victims now. It is simply too late to help them all. The focus must be to help these countries develop their economies. Teach them how to fish, if you remember the chinese proverb.
This is not my uneducated opinion, but in fact you can hear Professor Hans Rosling [wikipedia.org] speak of this with a great deal of knowledge behind him.
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.
A non-Education based way to "cut" AIDS (Score:3, Interesting)
it's already funded [washingtonpost.com] and being offered as a solution
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
Re:A non-Education based way to "cut" AIDS (Score:1, Interesting)
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 kids from infected mothers/fathers don't have the disease, but they may obviously get themselves infected the "normal" way)
"Normal":
1 person will infect 5 others in 1 generation (assuming a generation is about 30 years)
It takes : log(5;6000000000) = 13.98 generations = 419 years 8 months 5 days 23 hours and 5 minutes
"Chance of infection 'reduced by 70%' !"
1 person will infect 4.9999704755 others
It takes : log(4.9999704755;6000000000) = 13.98 generations = 419 years 8 months 5 days 23 hours and 5 minutes AND 42 seconds
So you've saved the human race ! For about 42 seconds. Well done ... (the difference is so little, because in order to make a "real" difference you're going to have to make sure that getting to 3 billion infectees is delayed by at least 15 years.
Then marriage :
Let's take muslim marriage principles first, since AIDS is a LOT more prevalent in muslim countries : there are 10% promiscuous women (I'm not saying 10% hookers, just 10% of women who remarry for whatever reason, most men have multiple partners, but, let's be generous, only 3. I mean, women don't have to turn hooker to get into this 10%). This changes the infection rate, of either men or women, to about 3 others, over their entire lifetime.
Well then you get log(3,6000000000) = 20.49405922217591609 generations
or 614 years, 9 months, 26 days, 16 hours, ...
One catch with this last figure, if muslim women have babies earlier than others, which seems to be true, though I don't know how much, this shortens the generation gap, making the number of years go down (and if they have babies on average 7 years earlier, this makes the difference exactly 0)
If everybody followed Christian marriage principles aids would be stopped dead in it's tracks. Now let's not kid ourselves however saying everybody is faithful : let's say (a random) 10% of people become "promiscuous". What happens ?
Since the 2 groups don't fuck with eachother (since anyone who does so obviously is part of that 10%, or becomes part of it by that act), AIDS will i infect the promiscuous group very quickly (in a matter of years) and will die out in the non-promiscuous group equally quickly : it will infect some insignificant number of them every generation, but it won't spread.
Hmmm this turned out to be a very politically incorrect post. Great :-p.
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.