Promising Vaccine Candidate Could Lead To a Definitive Cure For HIV 185
Zothecula writes "A very promising vaccine candidate for HIV/AIDS has shown the ability to completely clear the simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), a very aggressive form of HIV that leads to AIDS in monkeys. Developed at the Vaccine and Gene Therapy Institute at the Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU), the vaccine proved successful in about fifty percent of the subjects tested and could lead to a human vaccine preventing the onset of HIV/AIDS and even cure patients currently on anti-retroviral drugs."
Keep trying. (Score:2)
Most of these potential vaccines turn out to be unworkable - but try long enough and hard enough, eventually scientists will hit upon a really good one.
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This sounds like a pretty damn good one already, even if it only has a 50% success rate so far.
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On SIV. We don't know yet if it even even work on HIV, and if it can how well the virus can evolve to counter it. HIV is exceptionally adaptive, even by viral standards.
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According to TFA:
As with most early vaccine candidates, the study revolves around SIV. SIV is much more aggressive than HIV: it replicates up to 100 times faster and when unchecked it can cause AIDS in only two years.
To me that sounds like it should actually be easier to clear HIV than SIV.
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Not really. One of the reasons why HIV is such a nasty bugger is that it can lay unobserved for prolonged periods of time. If you've only got 2 years, before onset of AIDS, that's going to greatly reduce the amount of spreading it does.
It's not about how quickly you can clear it, it's about how effective the vaccine is at preventing the infection in the first place. 50% is not a particularly good number. It's a hell of a lot better than nothing, but it's nowhere near high enough to justify changing ones vie
Re:Keep trying. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm just waiting for there to be an accidental release of smallpox. I know that nearly no one from my generation on has been vaccinated. A single out break of that in a major metro area and international airport would be one of the most devastating things our generation could witness.
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you do realize that "somehow survived" with the current generation was via a global effort to eradicate it via vaccination. Not from any type of evolution or genetic traits. for the current generations that have never been vaccinated it will be just as bad as it was for the native americans.
There is no cure for an active small pox infection, only prevention through vaccination. and once there is an outbreak and people are infected it will be too late to vaccinate, sure you will still do it and you will m
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You do realize how viruses work right? and how your body fights them right?
For small pox:
Of all those infected, 20–60%—and over 80% of infected children—died from the disease
You do realize how freaking scary that is right? Sure it's not a 100% death rate, but 80% in children is damn close, and 20-60% in adults is really damn scary.
Just think, at a 50% death rate, you would need each living person to bury another living person. Sure Evolution "somehow" favored our ancestors, but that doesn
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Most of these potential vaccines turn out to be unworkable - but try long enough and hard enough, eventually scientists will hit upon a really good one.
I agree. We've seen [slashdot.org] these headlines before on Slashdot, but they seem to be getting more and more closer to the target each time.
Here today, forgotten tomorrow. (Score:2)
I hear about these HIV/AIDS cures every year but they always disappear.
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See where it says promising, candidate, and could in the title? Those means that it's not here, but we're getting closer. Doesn't mean that we're there yet, and as such all those promising candidates that could be a cure disappear because they were just that, promising candidates that could be...but ended up not being.
Actual Pathogenesis Data relegated to Supps? (Score:2, Insightful)
Why is figure 12 in the supplements, it seems to be the most important part (it compares cd4+ T-cell levels)? It is not even mentioned in the main text. Isn't reduction in the actual pathology the most important goal of a treatment?
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Nature papers are really short compared to others. Pretty much all the actual content gets put in supplements.
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Because destroying the virus is the primary purpose of the vaccine?
Th immune recovery is merely an effect of that and would be the proxy.
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Yeah this - viral loading is how you judge whether a patient is sick or not or responding to treatment. The depletion of the immune system only happens once you develop AIDS, rather then just HIV infection. And we've been decent at preventing AIDS for a while, but the headline news is really "we can clear an HIV (well, SIV) infection maybe".
I mean it's really hard for me to imagine what a world where "HIV is a couple of sucky years of intensive medication" is like. I grew up in Australia where we had the gr
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If you can posit a mechanism where a vaccine against a virus might restore your tcell count but leave the virus untouched, you might have a point, but there is no such mechanism.
Or, perhaps, come up with ANY example of someone whose viral load is removed where they don't see immune recovery...
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Vaccines are sometimes a different virus. For example, smallpox vaccine is/was cowpox.
It does look like test subjects with a co-infection with HTLV1 would confound the results, but that wouldn't apply to simians. if/when human testing is done, I would imagine they'll stick to mono-infected subjects to avoid confounding the results.
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Those are confounding issues to claim of an AIDS cure. However, this is an HIV vaccine whose endpoint is eradication of HIV from the patent. That's why they measure viral load rather than Tcels or the patient's general feeling of satisfaction with life.
Once that step is taken and the vaccine is shown to be effective at it's primary objective, we can look at the mechanisms that can lead to immune non-response.
Otherwise, why not use patient happiness as the endpoint? After all, if people were happy to have AI
After watching the video (Score:5, Insightful)
This sounds really interesting...
It sounds like, instead of infecting the patient with a blunted virus that would eventually die away, they are permanently infecting the patient with a persistent virus that looks and acts like their target but causes no harm to keep up the immune response over the long haul. Sounds to me like a really interesting approach.
Maybe someone could enlighten me to the history of this approach in the treatment of other diseases, or is it novel?
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Maybe someone could enlighten me to the history of this approach in the treatment of other diseases, or is it novel?
The Smallpox [wikipedia.org] vaccine used this approach very succesfully :)
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The Smallpox [wikipedia.org] vaccine used this approach very succesfully :)
Well they are using a live vaccine (based on Adenoviridae), but the idea is that it will get killed by the immune system and therefor reduce immune response over time... Whereas this vaccine is going for a persistent infection of the vaccine virus. Or am I misreading the info on the Smallpox vaccine?
Re:After watching the video (Score:5, Funny)
Is this persistent virus infectious? I guess a vaccination that you get by having sex with a vaccinated person might prove quite popular ;-)
Captcha: screwed - are the Captchas generated by an AI?
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For example, I will be 45 next week. If we take "several decades" to mean 3 decades, then at the end of "several decades" I will be 75 years old. None of the men in my family have lived past 70 so, there is a really good chance that in the next several decades I will be dead.
You don't give up on something just because it isn't perfect.
phase 1 trials (Score:2)
Several companies are starting their phase 3 trials about now. I've invested in one of them. If they are successfull I'll retire, but I mostly invested just to make sure someone is working on it.
It takes time to move from "killing viruses in a jar" to actually making something that removes the viruses from people without killing them at the same time.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDS#Epidemiology [wikipedia.org]
HIV/AIDS is a global pandemic. As of 2010, approximately 34 million people have HIV worldwide. Of these approximately 16.8 million are women and 3.4 million are less than 15 years old. It resulted in about 1.8 million deaths in 2010, down from a peak of 2.2 million in 2005.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth#Human_population_growth_rate [wikipedia.org]
The CIA World Factbook gives the world annual birthrate, mortality rate, and growth rate as 1.89%, 0.79%, and 1.095%
Re: Population growth (Score:2)
A very promising vaccine candidate for HIV/AIDS has shown the ability to completely clear the simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), a very aggressive form of HIV that leads to AIDS in monkeys. Developed at the Vaccine and Gene Therapy Institute at the Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU), the vaccine proved successful in about fifty percent of the subjects tested and could lead to a human vaccine preventing the onset of HIV/AIDS and even cure patients currently on anti-retroviral drugs.
Not the best idea, but maybe those who can't afforded the treatment can be subsidized by the government if they agree to sterilization.
Re: Population growth (Score:2)
Not the best idea, but maybe those who can't afford the treatment can be subsidized by the government if they agree to sterilization.
If fact, the government should subsidize all voluntary sterilizations and forms of birth control. Almost all of the worlds problems stem from overpopulation. Furthermore, if they incentivize this, it may be possible to achieve negative population growth.
People think that individuals on welfare have babies on purpose, but the reality is they can't afford birth control. Give free birth control to anyone who wants it, it's as simple as:
1) a medical professional writes you prescription.
2) you take it to the pha
Re:Population growth (Score:4, Insightful)
CMV and Heterlogous Antigen Delivery (Score:5, Informative)
As someone who actually worked on (albeit briefly) an HIV vaccine candidate, I'd like to comment that there have been a number of successful anti-SIV vaccines already, each of which have gone on to miserable -- and expensive -- failures when the underlying technology was applied to an HIV vaccine. And for those candidates that actually made it to human trials before failure, each attempt had a human cost as well (conspiracy theorists, go fuck yourselves).
That being said, the approach used is rather clever, if someone risky. The technique used is what is known as a "Heterologous Antigen" delivery, but in this case it has been combined with a persistent agent that establishes a life-long infection. The vector used was Rhesus Cytomegalovirus, which has a analogous human virus known as Human Cytomegalovirus [wikipedia.org], aka Herpesvirus-5.
CMV is a very common infection (in some countries 90+%, although somewhat lower in the United States). It's generally considered harmless to healthy individuals, and most pick it up during childhood, where it is commonly passed around in daycare centers and such. Initial symptoms are usually mild and non-specific (although in some individuals it can produce Mono-like symptoms [wikipedia.org]), and typically afterwards the viral infection is well-controlled with no further signs of infection. Unlike some more famous members of the Herpesvirus family, it does not produce any sores or vesicles or such.
However, on occasion it can be dangerous, as one of the infectious agents that can sometimes result in TORCH syndrome [wikipedia.org] effects (like the infamous "Blueberry Muffin Baby") when primary infections (first encounter with the infectious agent for an individual) occurs in a pregnant women. It can also be dangerous in immunosuppressed individuals, such as organ transplant recipients and advanced AIDS patients.
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Who would sign up for that?
Candidates who are already at risk of HIV exposure, e.g. prostitutes.
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In addition, you don't deliberately expose the vaccination candidate, you vaccinate a test population with a proper double blind*
*IE not all are actually vaccinated, and you disclose this to the population (There's a 50/50 chance we're injecting you with plain saline, and even then we don't know if the vaccine will work!)
If you do this with 200 people, and 5 come up with the disease out of the control group and 1 out of the vaccine group, you have something to go on towards longer/larger term studies.
With v
A Bill Hicks Prophecy (Score:2)
The day they come out with a guaranteed one-shot cure for AIDS, there will be f***ing in the streets.
"IT'S OVEEEEERRRRR!"
"WHOOOOOHOOOO!"
"Who are you? C'mere!"
"No, it's over! YEAH!"
And if you can't get laid that day, just cut it off!
just wait (Score:2)
Just as there's mass hysteria and a lot of unfounded accusations around the rubella and other vaccinations, there will be with the HIV vaccine as well. Ignorant parents will insist it made their kid autistic or ADHD or a gangbanger or whatever.
"Very Promising" (Score:2)
Somewhat misleading - I listened to this topic on NPR for the past week (first heard about it Monday - yay /.!). 50% of test cases were successful, so while the vaccine is a good thing to continue to investigate, "very promising" is a bit off as it needs more work. Although, it should also be noted that SIV is a much much more deadly disease than HIV/AIDS.
Re:Not gonna happen (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is why they spent over $500 million in 2011 just on HIV vaccine clinical trials? Sorry, your argument doesn't really hold water, and anyway the company that *does* come up with the vaccine will make a killing.
Re:Not gonna happen (Score:5, Insightful)
Not just make a killing, but will put all the other companies out of business as their treatments become worthless.
Re:Not gonna happen (Score:5, Insightful)
Besides any vaccination campaign would take some years to ramp up and anti-retrovirals become less effective and ultimately go out of patent over time any way. So it's not like their business is going to go bust over night or wouldn't have drawn to a natural end anyway.
Re:Not gonna happen (Score:5, Insightful)
Only if they price it so that everyone who needs it can afford it. Obviously that won't happen, they will want to maximize profit in rich countries instead of practically giving it away in Africa, so all those poor people will still need the other cheaper treatments.
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Usually they practice price discrimination, which any Econ 101 student can demonstrate as a way to price that maximizes your profits. A single, fixed price only benefits the wealthy.
Re:Not gonna happen (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, a number of big pharma companies do give away (or sell at cost) to poor regions like sub-Saharan Africa the same medications they charge an arm and a leg for in the richer parts of the world. Where the process breaks down is when a disease disproportionally affects a poor region (like malaria) such that there is not a fiscally sound business model for pursuing the high risk/benefit research involved with drug development.
As an aside, I think that one of the most commendable fields of the Gates Foundation is their promotion of research for malaria (see the TED talk where Gates releases a jar of mosquitoes into the audience).
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Re: Gates Foundation and malaria.
Also worthy of note is the GO Fight Against Malaria Project at World Community Grid and the research done at Scripps in La Jolla. From the Wikipedia article,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Community_Grid#GO_Fight_Against_Malaria_Project [wikipedia.org]
a relevant portion
"In the latest status report, published on November 2012 and available here, the scientists reported that several compounds had been found to inhibit the virus activity. 20 compounds were ordered, 19 actually arrived, o
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So are you saying you don't understand that drugs cost huge amounts of money to research, develop, test, and approve? Or is it that you don't understand that no business concern can operate at a loss indefinitely?
It may SUCK that we have to make these decisi
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My child is deathly ill. If, however, you give me all your savings, his life can be saved.
Would you?
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You should go to the Wiki and look up "Why the fuck would they bother investing money in all that to begin with if they plan to exsanguinate themselves by operating at a loss from the start". The sunk cost fallacy means "Don't throw good money after bad", not "Throw your money in the garbage plan because you'll never make anything o
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I have patents on that business model, asshole.
You will be hearing from my attorney!
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And that's just worldwide. As an exercise to improve your awareness of the facts, go look up the causes of death in the U.S. and report back to us. Don't forget to mention motor vehicle accidents (4 times the deaths caused by HIV), and FREAKING DIABET
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And the rape victims. Especially the 9-year-old girls who are raped because it's believed sex with a virgin will cure you of the disease. Yeah, everyone with HIV totally deserves it.
Re:Not gonna happen (Score:5, Funny)
Nah, then they will just pay someone to write a paper stating that HIV vaccine causes autism.
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parent up please
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Re:Not gonna happen (Score:4, Informative)
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You think all Bayer makes is HIV treatments? Losing one product doesn't make a company go bankrupt.
True, when Bayer's heroin sales became unpopular, and then it lost it's Zyklon-B product line, they still had aspirin to fall back on.
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Which is why they spent over $500 million in 2011 just on HIV vaccine clinical trials? Sorry, your argument doesn't really hold water, and anyway the company that *does* come up with the vaccine will make a killing.
I agree, but you are arguing against a conspiracy theory, never works.
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the company that *does* come up with the vaccine will make a killing.
Wouldn't that mean the vaccine doesn't work?
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Yeah, like that's gonna work. Patents you have to keep secret are worthless, because as soon as someone else develops it (and your patent could strike), you'd have to go public with it anyway.
Tech burying only works exactly if you can go public with it but can claim that not releasing it is in some way good for the consumers.
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Patents you have to keep secret are worthless
Yeah, things that don't exist often are.
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Ok, that was very badly worded, of course "secret patents" are an oxymoron. What I meant is that it's possible to abuse the patent system in such a way that you don't disclose the critical parts of your invention. You simply do not patent them, knowing that your product is guarded by patents on one side and by trade secrets on the other side, ensuring that you neither have to produce it yourself if you don't want to, not allowing anyone else to do so.
There is actually even the tactic that you avoid patentin
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Re:Not gonna happen (Score:5, Funny)
You don't buy tinfoil hats. The ones you buy are all compromised. Learn how to build a tinfoil hat yourself.
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Nice try, shill. That's the new tactic, trying to sound like you're helping while undermining the system and paving the way for THEM. We all know already that you made sure that all the tinfoil we could buy on the open market has been tampered with to make it useless for building hats.
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To help the uninitiated I posted this in a thread devoted to dealing with the dangers of HAARP. I repost in the fervent hope it may be of use to enhancing the safety and sagacity of those who might otherwise be afflicted.
"There is a bit more to it. First, about the "tin-foil" - it's obvious to most, of course, that we're really speaking of aluminium foil (how that got originally termed 'tin-foil' is curious). Standard weight is OK for most.
"Here's the trick. It really requires a sandwich or layered appr
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You don't! You have to make it yourself, otherwise it could be made to allow the establishment to read your thoughts just when you thought you were safe!
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Nice tinfoil hat. When can I buy one?
The NSA has already read your post and will be mailing you one later today.
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Pharma companies make boatloads of money selling lifelong drugs to HIV sufferers. The last thing they want is a cure that'd kill the cash cow.
OTOH, have you any idea what would happen to the share price of the first company to produce a cure for AIDS? Any individuals in a position to suppress it would also likely stand to profit from a bonanza share options windfall. And suppressing it without shareholder approval would be potentially criminal, and definitely actionable in the civil courts.
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I always liked this line of tinfoil hat craziness. It reminds me of the people who say "there will never be a cure for cancer" except when you point out that there are indeed various clinical trials up now, and in some case experimental deployment of various cancer drugs now. My grandmother who has stage 4 lung cancer received a non-radiation treatment as part of her treatment plan, it reduced the size of the tumors by 50%. Sadly it didn't reduce it enough that they could successfully operate and remove
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It boils down to "Dead people don't make you money."
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Unless you're an undertaker.
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An increase in supply now only decreases the pool for later profits. You want them to live long enough to:
A) Have children
B) Bug their children to give them grandchildren.
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Additionally, there is more profit with older deaths due to add on services. Old and violent deaths in open casket funerals lets you make awesome additional charges on making the body presentable.
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They can vaccinate you with some poorly tested crap as well, then cash-in on the medication needed to cure the "side effects". Alzheimer's, cancers ... and restless leg syndrome.
It is a win-win situation for the pharma-industrial-complex. Also even if you don't FSCK around like rabbits, you will be either required or scared into thinking that you need the vaccination. Maybe some "accidental" blood contaminations breaking news will do that for you...
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They can vaccinate you with some poorly tested crap as well, then cash-in on the medication needed to cure the "side effects". Alzheimer's, cancers ... and restless leg syndrome.
I'm sorry, I must be behind on the medical literature. What vaccines have been proven to cause Alzheimer's or cancer?
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What cash cow? There is a lot of competition from India and elsewhere and in fact the profit from HIV drugs has become very low now. It used to cost $1000 a day to treat HIV .. now it's about $10 and there are many different companies making the drugs. How did the cost drop? Why didn't they keep the cost at $1000 a day so they can make more money?
If it's such a profitable business to make HIV drugs why don't you make them? You can make them in India or South Africa where patents on medicines are not recogni
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Even if that were true, if a competitor could kill that business and make only a few million in the process, that's still profit for them instead of the competitor.
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The way to make money is to offer:
1. A vaccine.
2. A cure.
3. Long-term treatment.
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Actually all 3 have various benefits:
Vaccine: It's great! You get to sell it to people who aren't even sick yet!
Cure: You beat everybody else who only have treatments for selling it. Gotta love competitive advantage. Generally speaking the person will survive longer and buy other stuff in your line of products.
Long-term treatment: They keep coming back, yes, but you can have problems keeping it affordable.
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:)
Though vets in the US and Canada might not have much need, I can see an immediate use for this vaccine as it stands...
From: Wikipedia: Simian immunodeficiency virus [wikipedia.org]
Beatrice Hahn of the University of Pennsylvania recently led a team of researchers to find that chimpanzees do die from simian AIDS in the wild and that the AIDS outbreak in Africa has contributed to the decline of chimpanzee populations.
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"There's other STDs too, yanno. Might want still to whip a rubber on your cock."
Nearly all of them easily curable.
The people who said "The sexual revolution is over; the microbes won" were wrong. They didn't have modern medical technology.
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"Tell that to the person taking meds to keep his herpes from flaring up."
You DO know what NEARLY means, right?
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"Are you nuts? Tell that to the over 30,000,000 people in the US alone with HPV. Yeah they say they have a vaccine now for it, but that's for younger kids who haven't had much, if any sex. "
First, I wrote NEARLY. I didn't write "all".
Second: [A] HPV often goes away by itself. [webmd.com] [B] While it isn't curable (yet) it *IS* treatable. And [C] as you mentioned, vaccines are available so it will only be less of a problem in the future. That isn't an argument against my point, it is an argument for it.
It's getting better. A cure for herpes is probably right around the corner [foxnews.com] (shingles "vaccine" being an example of a treatment for people who are already infected with a different but just as nasty
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The world is full of stupid and reckless people. We can't fix this, but at least a vaccine can contain the damage.
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Also:
A hard cock has no conscience.
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There are also blood bank contaminations, health workers get it from blood, and there are the unlucky who are born with it.
Also rubbers break and if you are really unlucky thee are other ways to get it... blood contacting your wound, eyes.. etc.. While not common, it can happen...
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So you're not a dentist, a physician, surgeon, EMT, tattoist, piercer, virus technician, phlebotomist, LNA, RN, LPN, or a compassionate person with first aid skills so you would never, ever come into contact with anyone else's blood, and you're fortunate enough to never, ever need a transfusion, require dental work, or any surgery or injections? There are people who live straight-edge lives who have contracted HIV, you know - and that doesn't take into account rape victims, children of AIDS patients, and
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Also, the one in something like 30-billion chance that you contract it through a handshake? It hasn't ever been confirmed to happen but is theoretically possible. Also, I hope you don't use public toilets, because some HIV strains have been evolved which can survive for long periods in the open air on hard surfaces. Don't use public restrooms, don't touch handrails, etc.
Not everyone with HIV is gay (most aren't!), has "unsafe" sex, or does IV drugs.
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HIV is a prevalently heterosexual disease in _Africa_. They have some weird sexual practices there that makes it transmit much better. African standard for 'perfect pussy' is bone dry and very tight.
The straight AIDS epidemic has still not arrived in the first world. It remains largely a gay and IV drug users disease. Women that fuck gay men and drug abusers are catching it, but mostly that's as far as it goes.
Put bluntly, to catch AIDS through sex you have to be 'a catcher'.
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True, but there are multiple companies working on these things. If one doesn't have a drug on the market then they're not benefitting from the other companies making money and it WOULD work better for them to develop a cure.
Also, take note that this isn't a straight-up cure - its a vaccination. Think about that for a second - its expanding the market. If you're marketting a cure, or even just treatments, then you're only selling your drug to people that actually have the disease. A vaccination gets take
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That's ridiculous. I realize that it's cool to hate on big pharma, but let's keep it within the realm of reality.
HIV related medications aren't something that the industry would like to be involved in. The medications don't last very long before the virus mutates it in a way that renders it ineffective. During that time they have to charge huge amounts of money to hopefully break even before they need a new medication. Same goes for antibiotics, the more you sell, the less effective it becomes. And a lot of
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Or in other words, big pharma would be more than happy to cure HIV because it's just not that profitable compared with other chronic diseases and there's little predictability about how much they could make in the future.
Not only that, it's fantastic PR. The company that produces a vaccine that ends the HIV pandemic will be bragging about it for the next several decades, and rightly so. (Same goes for cancer, the common cold, etc.) They will be guaranteed profits, because foundations like Gates, NGOs lik
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Pretty much. I'm not the biggest fan of big pharma, but some of the conspiracy theories are just ridiculous. Yes, they do tend to overcharge and use government subsidies to help their profits, but there's more than enough incurable diseases out there to provide treatments for to make it not worthwhile to hold back on cures for things that can be cured.
Preventative medicine isn't really their domain anyways.
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Why it works in 50% might have something to do with how the CMV vaccines already in trials (not for HIV) only have a 50% efficacy rate in humans. This is according to a 2009 study I found via Wikipedia...