AIDS Vaccine Breakthrough 417
Doc Ruby writes "Scientists at Johns Hopkins University in MD, USA announced they've disrupted the means by which HIV stops the immune system from attacking it. From the article: 'Scientists say they have found a way to disarm the AIDS virus in research that could lead to a vaccine. Researchers have discovered that if they eliminate a cholesterol membrane surrounding the virus, HIV cannot disrupt communication among disease-fighting cells and the immune system returns to normal. [...] "By stealing cholesterol from the envelope of the virus, we can neutralize the subversion," said Graham. "We've broken the code; we can shut down the type of interference that HIV is having on the immune system."'"
The future is here at last (Score:3, Funny)
With the recent deluge of articles on curing aids, cancer and even the common cold, is the future finally here? Are we going Deus Ex in a few years now?
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We can only hope, but I want the chin augment that Jensen has.
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Re:The future is here at last (Score:4, Interesting)
Not funny, Insightful. We could have Star Trek-level technology and we'd still suffer with the awful legacy of man's basest instincts and the old cognitive bugs from our days stalking prey and eluding predators in the jungle.
If an AIDS vaccine were available on the market tomorrow, the right-wingers would want to stop it from being distributed, worried that it will cause autism or take the danger out of sexual promiscuity (see: HPV vaccine). Scientologists would worry that it will bring volcano spirits back into your soul or something. The alternative medicine crowd would say it's useless and a Big Pharma scam.
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I hear this argument all the time, but I think this counter-argument is much more effective.
If a drug company develops a working cure for HIV/AIDS, they can do no wrong for the next generation. They'll eventually own most other drug companies. Just imagine the commercials.
"You could buy brand A aspirin or your could by GloboCureCorp's aspirin. Remember GloboCureCorp's fantastic success with the plague of the 20th century. Who are you going to trust your headache to? GloboCureCorp's aspirin, brought to you b
Re:The future is here at last (Score:4, Insightful)
I am not sure about the recent part, there have always been miracle cancer cures just around the corner for as long as I have been old enough to read the news.
This is promising, but wake me up when they actually cure/prevent the disease in a person with this.
And what does curing diseases have to do with cyborg augmentations?
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This is promising, but wake me up when they actually cure/prevent the disease in a person with this.
My thoughts exactly. I don't demean their research, but realistically I'm not that interested in a play-by-play for the development. I'll consider all this a breakthrough when I can go down to Walgreens and get an AIDS vaccine.
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Because when we are done curing disease, the next step is augmentations :)
Re:The future is here at last (Score:5, Informative)
This goes beyond simple theories and pipe dreams. This was actively performed in a lab and the process is well documented. This actually pokes holes in the cholesterol membrane using a chemical called beta-cyclodextrin. This chemical binds to this special type of cholesterol around an HIV cell, which had two desired effects. It prevented the HIV virus from hyper-activating PDC's (the mechanism which damages the immune response itself), and it seems it also damaged it's ability to replicate. The chemical actually leaves the membrane riddled with holes due to this binding process.
This is very promising in that the function they are disrupting is at the very root of what makes HIV effective in avoiding the immune system. Once this happens, the immune system is able to respond to the virus much like it would any other typical pathogen.
The one thing that wasn't made clear was what the impact will be to those who are already infected. It sounds as if this could potentially be useful to existing infections as well but I haven't seen any statements to that effect as of yet.
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I agree, and to me anyways it sounds even more like a potential cure then a preventative measure.
But I have heard of lots of miracle drugs going to even human trials, drugs that show huge success in labs (it does not mean that it will actually turn out to have significant real world effect).
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make it lose containment. It's completely useless ... after that.
Maybe someone listened to my idea.
Indeed, no researcher anywhere has ever considered attacking the AIDS virus cell wall. Step up and receive your Nobel prize, sir.
Anyway, that's not even what's happening. The virus doesn't lose containment. To put this in your sort of parlance, this is more akin to disrupting a cloaking field than causing shields to be lowered. This cyclodextrine stuff uses photon torpedoes to alter the subspace field used to generate the cloaking field and only the cloaking field (ie the chloresterol layer) and not the
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And what does curing diseases have to do with cyborg augmentations?
No disease to take you out early --> slow physical degradation of body components ("wearing out") --> miserable quality of life --> desire to replace worn body parts with artificial ones
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Actually HIV may really be on its way out ..modern treatments are to the point where you can live a normal healthy life and die of something else. Well as long as you maintain your health insurance anyway.
HIV will probably be cured over the next decade .. it will not be a single breakthrough though it will be gradual so it won't seem like you woke up one day and HIV is cured .. it'll be like 15 to 20 years from now while sitting on your couch you'll suddenly wonder "whatever happened to that disease everyon
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Which puts us like 20 years behind. HIV was a really stupid epidemic. Early on folks getting infected was going to happen, but when it became known that it was an STI and that not having sex with HIV infected partners would stop the spread, it became really stupid for people to contract it on the scale that they did.
Re:The future is here at last (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, because that knowledge was so effective in nearly eradicating chlamydia, syphilis, gonorrhea, herpes, trichomoniasis....
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Me? Promiscuous? Ha. Haha. HAHAHAHAHA!
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That and using other people's needles for injecting drugs. It's just plain dumb. Might even say it's evolution in action.
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In action within people or within nations? Because there are several that looked at it calmly and rationally and started distributing clean needles to drug addicts, thus stopping the spread of HIV through that vector. And there are those that didn't, because that could seen as to be helping the undeserving [wikipedia.org].
Re:The future is here at last (Score:4, Insightful)
Fun fact: that was largely because at first it spread amongst gay men quicker then heterosexuals, and the prevailing attitude was "great, this will finally get rid of the gays!"
Thus governments assumed they didn't need any sort of public education campaigns about it.
Then at some point, once someone realized straight people also have promiscuous sex (and there are tons more of them so it didn't seem like an epidemic till much later) did we decide to do anything about it.
People are still having sex (Score:3)
Nope, it is still in the future (Score:2, Insightful)
The article hints at a way to attack the virus in the lab. There is absolutely no attempt yet to do the same in a human body. Can it be done safely? While the article says the cholestrerol membrane is not the same as the one that occurs in things related to coronary disease, is it maybe in use somewhere else? Wouldn't be much point in an AIDS vacine that causes you to fall apart in a puddle.
But the cure for AIDS has been here for a long time. How many people do you know with AIDS? I am not just making anoth
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In case you have problem with neuances i'll spell it out for you. A HIV infection if left untreated will result in AIDS, at which point you're pretty much toast. A HIV infection on its own does not however qualify as AIDS with modern retroviral treatment(or the intial stage without treatment) will
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ow if you excuse me I'll have to crash the moon into earth before I have to repeat this rant any more times.
maybe if you crashed the moon into earth, all those stupid earthlings would stop crashing their rockets between the moons, and the epidemic might stop...
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AIDS was this terrible nightmare from a by gone era when some people who made a lot of noise in the media had unprotected sex with everyone else in the group.
AIDS is still a nightmare in third word countries. Don't dismiss it just because symptoms in the developed world are relatively scarce.
Re:Nope, it is still in the future (Score:5, Insightful)
Problem is there is this nasty thing called "religion" whose adherents keep on insisting that condoms are somehow wrong, and that sex is for procreation only.
A big part of the problem is all those religious jerks that are coming to those third world countries to insist on that. Fortunately they're not getting all that much traction in civilized places, but in third world countries it's devastating.
Add to that ridiculous notions held by people in some of those countries, like that sex with a virgin will cure you, and you have one horrible mess as a result.
Kicking out all those missionaries and bringing in some proper education would do wonders.
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No, the religion isn't the problem. The problem is people only listening to part of what the religious people are saying. Most (all?) of the religions that forbid condoms also preach sex for procreative purposes in marriage only. If you have sex with one person (and only one person), and they do the same for their entire life, it's nigh on impossible to get an STD. In fact, I'm pretty sure the safety margin is far, far higher than that with condoms. From wikipedia [wikipedia.org], the risk reduction from using a condom is
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Yes it is. Problem with that, people have been demonstrated not to care that much about the "sex for procreative purposes in marriage only" part. However, the condoms part seems to work a lot better.
Why is that? Probably because controlling behavior, especially what people do in pri
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The problem is that the missionaries are letting perfect be the enemy of good. Their perfect plan for the elimination of STDs, when executed imperfectly, leads to a horrific spread of STDs (since they don't recommend condoms, so every slip-up has a great chance of spreading STDs and causing unwanted pregnancies). A scientist's less ambitious, imperfect plan for the reduction of STD spreading, when executed imperfectly, will still cut down on the spread of STDs (since people might "forget" to use a condom, b
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No, this is wrong. It implies that contraception in marriage is okay. Maybe if you have children at some point, as your sentence isn't very clear on that.
The religious argument is:
1. Sex only in a marriage
2. Each sex act must be unitive and procreative. You're not allowed to artificially inte
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Don't go lumping all religions together. There is nothing in Islam that says contraception isn't allowed, and there's plenty of literature (both recent and ancient) on the subject that says that sex can and should be fun.
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Point, I should have said "Catholicism"
Allowing contraception is of course better, but it's still full of ridiculous rules like no sex outside of marriage.
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1. Have as much sex as you want.
2. Use a condom.
Surprise surprise, people, especially in poor countries, often only listen to the first part. So, using your quote of Feynman (in fact, in my case it's more applicable, since condoms are an actual technology), condoms are not a practical solution.
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I repeat: solutions must be reality based.
Yes, if they did, it would work. But people don't, which has been proven over and over. So a realistic solution must start from accepting that fact and finding a solution that allows for promiscuity.
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The cure is latex, it works, it has been tried and tested.
You know that. I know that. But try telling that to all the zillion word users out there...
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The cure is latex, it works, it has been tried and tested. Not science, or as you put it, the futures fault you refuse to take your medicine.
...
Odd stuff, just because we got cure for food poisoning doesn't mean people started eating rotten food on purpose.
If rotten food tasted a whole helluvalot better than safe food, they would.
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Odd that it takes a death threat to get people to use condoms? Condoms take the animal unbridled instinct feeling out of sex, which makes it less fun. The fun in sex is to a large extent due to the fact that it's on kernel code level. The moment you have to escape from kernel code into userland, you lose the feeling of... lack of control :) The point of fornication (which sex with a condom definitely attempts to be) is the pleasure you get out of letting your most basic programming take over. Pulling out a
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The programming references were good, but I think I still need a car analogy.
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One doesn't need abstinence in order to be HIV negative for an entire life. One just needs to get regularly tested, use protection and keep sex partners to some sort of sane number. And avoid sharing needles. Then there's the rare occurence of contracting HIV from a transfusion, but that's a risk that's sufficiently low for most people to not even bother worrying bout. If people would do that, then HIV wouldn't be common and would probably just die out in a matter of time.
Quarantine (Score:2)
After a while the disease either dies out or evolves to be less harmful.
Nowadays with the technology we have, many people or communities can remain productive and live not too terrible lives while under quarantine (heck some WoW players wouldn't even notice the difference
If everyone with just a sniffle worked from home and avoided contact with others, the common cold
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Flu epidemics are caused by viruses jumping species form birds and pigs to humans. It's a new disease (which has similar symptoms to old ones) each time, thus it doesn't evolve into harmlesnness.
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What do you think latex referred to? (Score:5, Informative)
I say several times UNPROTECTED sex. I mention latex explicitly. Was I being that subtle in referring to condoms?
And the underlying cause in Africa is not sex, it is rape. Mass rape. It is an cultural attitude to women that is getting ever more brutal.
Read a little about conditions in for instance South Africa before you go all indignant.
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And the underlying cause in Africa is not sex, it is rape. Mass rape. It is an cultural attitude to women that is getting ever more brutal.
Read a little about conditions in for instance South Africa before you go all indignant.
Source?
I live in Mozambique and, while there are definitely higher rape rates than in the USA, they DO NOT account for the HIV rates. I can tell you with certainty that there is a culture of promiscuous sex that runs rampant despite the knowledge of high HIV infection rates. It is not uncommon in the least for a man or a woman to have 10 partners within a month. From my experience (I lived in Botswana for 3 years the highest AIDS rate country in the world before moving here to Mozambique) consensual sex
Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit (Score:5, Informative)
"Africa is both the epicenter for the disease, and is a poverty-stricken continent where people need to have families, and relatively large ones at that, in order to be taken care of in their old age. These features are sufficient to explain the sustained high infection rate without resorting to the racist twaddle you're apparently peddling. "
Oh boy, you're so full of bullshit.
"Medical experts have shown a clear association between HIV exposure and coerced sex. Wives who suffer violence if they request condom use or faithfulness are at higher risk of AIDS than unmarried women and girls. That is why defeating the AIDS pandemic requires a second radical proposition: that African women and girls have the right to protection under their own countries' laws.
Why is this concept radical? Because public justice systems in many AIDS-burdened countries are broken or virtually inaccessible to poor girls and women. Rape and beatings are simply the norm, and deterrence and accountability for these crimes in Africa is as rare as AIDS drugs used to be."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/13/AR2006081300716.html [washingtonpost.com]
"Rape, including child rape, is increasing at shocking rates in South Africa. Sexual violence against children, including the raping of infants, has increased 400% over the past decade (Dempster, 2002). According to a report by BBC news, a female born in South Africa has a greater chance of being raped in her lifetime than learning how to read (Dempster, 2002). When South Africa became a democracy in 1994, there were already 18,801 cases of rape per year, but by 2001 there were 24,892 (Dempster, 2002). Numbers vary by different institutions, but are nevertheless extremely troubling. The Institute of Race Relations found that more than 52,000 rapes were reported in 2000, and 40% of the victims were under age 18 (du Venage, 2002). The University of South Africa reports that 1 million women and children are raped there each year (South Africa: Focus on the Virgin Myth, 2002)."
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/444213 [medscape.com]
http://www.scienceinafrica.co.za/2002/april/virgin.htm [scienceinafrica.co.za]
Also, big families don't cause rape, you can't catch an infection from a clean partner no matter how many times you have sex.
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The trouble with having large families, is that large families are themselves a cause for many of the problems...
You have a shortage of food and can't afford to feed yourself properly, so you have lots of kids and make the problem worse?
You may need lots of kids to look after you in old age, but who is going to look after them? They will have to do the same and so you get very rapid population growth... Population grows to unsustainable levels and then any problems like food shortage become much worse.
The s
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You are calling him racist for pointing out the rape epidemic in Africa? Are we just not allowed to talk about it? Some sort of moral relativity/the third world is always right sort of thing?
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No. We still need an aneutronic microfusion generator, human-level AI, and antigravity.
Of these the solution to our current energy crisis is the big one. AI is evolving constantly, and antigravity isn't really necessary if you simply have enough energy, but energy nothing is possible.
Oh, and we also need to stop our slide to plutocracy, unless of course we want one of the more dystopic futures.
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I had this chicken pizza the other day that was phenomenal.
The secret? A small amount of feta cheese, it turns out. The chopped tomato didn't hurt either.
Feta cheese, it turns out, isn't a very good idea. The secret? It promotes the health of the cholesterol membrane that HIV uses to disrupt the immune system, leading to quicker onset of AIDS.
Real or hype? (Score:2)
Scientists say
traditional indication of hype
could lead
Oh its just hype after all.
Oh well... I'd like a /. story about how its real easy to have a working nuclear fusion reactor. All you need is to build a reactor, and then turn it on. No big deal, everyone be happy now.
This is not a story about vaccine trials, just a "wouldn't it be great if ..."
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The title is a bit misleading, but the content isn't. Knowing how to disarm the virus is a significant development. It's certainly not the same thing as a cure, but it is more than hype.
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I also wonder, how they retain cholesterol at normal body cells that need it to their normal function.
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Its not that complicated when you go large.. like the sun for instance. Something medium sized would be good though, last I heard they were about 20 years away (they've been saying that for about 40 years though so.. ymmv etc)
Re:Real or hype? (Score:4, Informative)
What a week (Score:2)
the cure for AIDS, coming at you faster than the speed of light!
Wooo! (Score:2, Funny)
I'm off to the whorehouses!
Only one to protect yourself (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Only one to protect yourself (Score:4, Insightful)
Laugh all you like, but if people actually took that advice a few years ago we wouldn't have AIDS anymore.
That and "Don't share needles".
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Those folks typically die before they reach adulthood. If you can get yourself laid, then you can get yourself married. It's not like it's that hard to find somebody that is as desperate as the person who hypothetically isn't ever going to marry because they can't.
The only major exception I can think of is where the law prohibits marriage and those folks usually end up partnering up for life without the documents.
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Not necessarily. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is a matter of opinion, but a marriage contract does have an effect on the likelihood of a couple staying together.
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but a marriage contract does have an effect on the likelihood of a couple staying together.
Not necessarily. Kids do. And unfortunately, those who are not allowed to marry can't have their own kids, and aren't allowed to adopt kids.
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What about those folks that can't get married?
In this context it doesn't matter. If you are in a faithful monogamous relationship then you're okay. If you aren't then the problem (and solution) is the same no matter your gender, orientation or marital status.
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Marriage isn't a magical barrier. It's the monogamy that comes along with marriage that protects you. A married man who visits the red light district every weekend is probably gonna catch something nasty. A gay man who can't marry, but only has sex with a few partners before settling down with one is likely going to be safe.
Re:Only one to protect yourself (Score:5, Insightful)
Aye, and if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a wagon.
The problem with this advice – and pretty much every other "just say no" solution to a social or medical problem – is that it ignores human nature... and the empirically documented fact that it simply doesn't work. Some people inevitably will have unprotected sex, will share needles, and will do everything else that they're told not to do. A "solution" that ignores this fact is one that is not 100% effective.
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The solution is 100% effective for those who utilize it. Your rationale applies equally to a vaccine: It is less than 100% effective for the people who do not receive it. I would certainly question which empirical documentation you can point to that shows that abstinence from both unprotected sex and shared needles "simply doesn't work" in this context.
In short, you should have stopped with the point that the abstinence argument ignores human nature. But then again, if it were human nature to abstain fro
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What if a woman gets raped by a man carrying HIV? What if you get in contact with an HIV-infected needle by accident?
Re:Only one to protect yourself (Score:5, Insightful)
Natural selection only "cares" (yes, i'm anthropomorphizing it, get over it) if you have kids and how many. It doesn't give a damn if you survive the process or not.
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You can get HIV without engaging in high-risk behavior. Just ask any woman who contracted the virus from monogamous sex with her husband... who was secretly having unsafe sex with other people.
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Laugh all you like, but if people actually took that advice a few years ago we wouldn't have AIDS anymore.
We'd also have a lot of rather awkward wedding nights. "Does it go here?" "Is it supposed to leak like that? Are you broken?" "I'm not sure, but I think that might be the wrong spot to put that." "Well that didn't seem to go on very long now did it?"
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Hey if other 'more primitive' animals figured it out, it really can't be that hard.
Re:Only one to protect yourself (Score:5, Informative)
Tell that to Isaac Asimov [wikipedia.org], who died due to AIDS caused by a blood transfusion.
Re:Only one to protect yourself (Score:4, Insightful)
Laugh all you like, but if people actually took that advice a few years ago we wouldn't have AIDS anymore.
That and "Don't share needles".
Spoken like a person who lives in a glass bubble.
We are sexual people. We don't just "turn sex off", that is not how we work.
Instead of teaching Abstinence, we should of been teaching about proper sex health, birth control, and protection, instead of just "hoping" people will not have sex. Because people do NOT stop having sex, no matter how much you ask them not to. Can you grasp that simple concept? The religious freaks haven't.
As for sharing needles, you once again, don't know shit.
Why did people share needles? Because they were so fucking hard to get. Until the last 10 or so years where they have had "Needle Exchanges" and pharmacies adopting of letting anyone buy needles, it was very hard and expensive to get clean works. And when your a junkie, your money goes to your dope, not to making sure you have clean works.
Our policies help made these problems, not the people who were stuck because of the policies.
That fact that you are currently 4 Insightful only shows how stupid most people are about these matters. It's easy to blame others, but the blame lies with all of us for not taking care of the less fortunate in our community, not at them because they have problems that we prefer to ignore.
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No, but you'll catch it and die, and that'll be the end of it.
Unless you remarry, then there will be a few more people - but the amounts would be small enough that it won't matter - and anyway it'll be clear that HIV is picking out the family by then.
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Why do you think marriage would protect you from getting AIDS?
Because abstinence is always effective.
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Why do you think marriage would protect you from getting AIDS?
Because he doesn't believe in adultery, divorce or premarital sex.
Re:Only one to protect yourself (Score:5, Insightful)
Abstinence is the worst of all the safe-sex choices.
The best way to describe it is, "It is 100% effective, when used correctly. When not used correctly it is 0% effective, and among females and males between 14-25 it has a very high failure rate."
How many non-Slashdot users do you know that are 25 years old and never had sex?
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How many non-Slashdot users do you know that are 25 years old and never had sex?
Well, there you go. It won't work, if you don't properly implement it.
Re:Only one to protect yourself (Score:4, Insightful)
1. You can actually stick to it, including those hormone-addled teenage years.
2. Your spouse (spouses, if you divorce and remarry) managed it as well.
3. You manage to avoid other means of infection. Rape, accidential exposure to blood.
It's also rather untidy, having to alter your life in order to avoid disease. Much tidier to simply remove the disease through science.
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The notion is similar to what Lord Monckton proposed, which was rounding up all the HIV+ people and putting them in internment camps. Which would work, except be (1) morally repungent [means never justifies the ends because the means is never 100% effective] and (2) assumes you'd actually be able to find 100% of HIV positive people.
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Quarentine wouldn't have worked on HIV anyway. The disease was first identified in the US, but had it's origin in Africa. By the time it was identified, it was already too late to contain.
Don't be so sure. Cuba implemented rigorous testing and quarantine early on quite successfully. They have since abandoned it and rates are on the rise.
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I am surprised this is modded funny, it is ridiculous actually.
Condoms are only like 97% effective, so while they reduce the chance you are still even likely to get a disease if you constantly have sex with a carrier.
It is up to the individual but unless you have quite a lot of evidence that someone is not a infected with a disease when you have sex with them even if you use a condom you are taking a chance.
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Give it a month. (Score:2)
It's a big deal (Score:3)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_HIV/AIDS_adult_prevalence_rate [wikipedia.org]
Can't understand how anybody can post snarky troll crap at all.
Did you know there are over 30 million people with HIV and 1 million are in the U.S., and it's apparently accelerating maybe?
These researchers probably deserve the nobel and the medal of honor. Here's hoping that something amazing comes out of this.
Of course the tangent everyone will want to know about is this cholesterol film around the virus they are disrupting.. and a naive question about whether there is something simple that can be done to reduce this cholesterol and weaken the virus' immune disruption activity, before waiting years for the real thing.
Such an awesome crowdsourcing success! (Score:2, Interesting)
I thought this was going to be another one of those "wow we have a cure for HIV but xyz" type of articles, but there is so much more to it than that.
The coolest part about this breakthrough is that it was directly generated by people playing the game "fold it". The game (which I've played in the past) involves turning various little nobules on molecules in order to try to match them up to certain shapes. It's fun and mindless, I had *no idea* that the results were actually being used by scientists working o
Re:Such an awesome crowdsourcing success! (Score:4, Informative)
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What about the other 10%?
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Thinking of Cancer as one disease is about the same as thing every infection as one disease.
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the vaccine does not prevent the virus from attacking it's host. It enables the immune system of the host to fight back and kill the virus
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Don't worry those truly worthy of the Darwin Award will think any vaccine is a CIA plot to infect them with HIV or cause autism or some silly shit like that. Hell we develop a vaccine for cervical cancer caused by HPV [wikipedia.org], and people refuse to give it to their kids because of some idea that it encourages premarital sexual activity. While the potential of a HIV vaccine is exciting, we still have measles [wikipedia.org], rubella [wikipedia.org], Diptheria [wikipedia.org] and pertussis [wikipedia.org], so it's unlikely that a HIV vaccine will eliminate HIV.
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Being from South Africa and having worked in health care, I can confidently tell you that the only people who think dumbass shit like "vaccines are a government plot" are "educated" people from first world countries.
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The current situation is that you end up with migrants coming who have HIV...
Over population is already a serious problem in some places, and it only fuels the tyranny and corruption... When you have an unsustainable level of population growth causing a shortage of food, people will become increasingly desperate to acquire food by whatever means necessary. They need to curb population growth, not through AIDS but through education and contraception (condoms would also help to reduce the spread of AIDS). Onc
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I label all my packages HIV, I've never had one run through with a forklift or drop-kicked into a truck. Works great!
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Yes, AIDS is a Syndrome caused by HIV which is a Virus. Your being a pedant served no purpose other than making an ass of yourself. There is no lazy journalism going on here.