Australian Scientists Discover Potential Aids Cure 232
smi.james.th writes "Several sites report that Australian researcher David Harrich and his team have potentially discovered a way to stop HIV becoming AIDS and ultimately cure the disease. From the article: 'What we've actually done is taken a normal virus protein that the virus needs to grow, and we've changed this protein, so that instead of assisting the virus, it actually impedes virus replication and does it quite strongly.' This could potentially hail one of modern medicine's greatest victories."
Let us celebrate.. (Score:5, Funny)
Let us celebrate with a trip to the brothel!
Re:Let us celebrate.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Besides that, there are plenty of other nasty, nasty diseases that you can catch apart from AIDS, such as Hepatitis C for instance. It would be interesting to see infection rates of other STD's increase if there isn't a fear disease like AIDS out there to promote the use of prophylactics.
Re:Let us celebrate.. (Score:4, Informative)
They're basically using elements of regenerative medicine here.
Re:Let us celebrate.. (Score:5, Informative)
This in no way arms the body with immune cells that are resistant to infection. This is a virostatic agent, that will stop the virus from replicating inside immune cells. But it does not block free virus from infecting new cells.
Re:Let us celebrate.. (Score:5, Insightful)
The trouble is that there *have* been a number of cures/vaccines, but HIV mutates so quickly that they were quickly rendered ineffective. HIV can differ significantly even between somebody and the person they were infected by, all depending on how their immune system responds to the infection and what drugs they are given.
Re:Let us celebrate.. (Score:5, Informative)
The trouble is that there *have* been a number of cures/vaccines, but HIV mutates so quickly that they were quickly rendered ineffective. HIV can differ significantly even between somebody and the person they were infected by, all depending on how their immune system responds to the infection and what drugs they are given.
The difference here is that the treatment targets several stages of the HIV "life-cycle". In micribiology targeting a single point of weakness of an organism is relatively quickly circumvented, but targeting many points of weakness has a much more devastating effect.
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We do 3 things with regards to viruses:
1) Vaccination - Keep you from getting it to begin with. 2) Elimination - If nobody gets it for a long enough period of time, it (mostly) disappears.
3) Symptom management - we can't cure you of the virus, but we can reduce the symptoms until (if/when) your body figures out how to deal with it itself.
Never have we been able
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As soon as I saw the word 'cure' I knew this was hyped up, because in all of mans history we have never once found a cure for any virus, ever.
There actually is that one guy they cured HIV/AIDs in while fixing his cancer. Considering what his health must be like now, he would have been better off on long-term treatments if they hadn't also needed to do something about the cancer. It's also my understanding that some retroviruses can be weakened with anti-retrovirals to the point that the immune system can clean them out of the system. Generally those are infections that are generally defeated by the immune system in the end anyway, of course.
Re:Let us celebrate.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, it has the potential to be much better than current treatments though it wouldn't actually be a cure. IF (and as always it's a big if) it really forces HIV to become latent, the patient would have a normal immune system and probably fewer side effects than with current drugs.
But it wouldn't be a cure, just a very effective lifelong treatment.
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That about sums it up as best I can tell from the article.
Its a different approach to than that used by most of the other drugs in that (if they can be believed)
they have found one protein that is critical in many different stages in the virus life cycle.
Yet to be seen is if people can tolerate the drug, and any side effects.
I wonder if this protein is so central to HIV that it can't mutate around it, and how they can eliminate
any natural occurring versions (the ones they haven't fiddled with) of this prote
Re:Let us celebrate.. (Score:4, Insightful)
But it wouldn't be a cure, just a very effective lifelong treatment.
And probably expensive. Why offer a one-time cure when you can offer a life-time treatment - he said cynically.
Re:Let us celebrate.. (Score:5, Insightful)
IF (and as always it's a big if) it really forces HIV to become latent, the patient would still be a host even when having a normal immune system
FTFY
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"Latent" and "wouldn't be a cure" already covered that.
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it wouldn't actually be a cure
How would it not be a cure if it stops the virus from replicating? The existing virus in the body would eventually die off, thus leaving no more infection.
Re:Let us celebrate.. (Score:4, Interesting)
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>But it wouldn't be a cure, just a very effective lifelong treatment.
Why would any fat cat want to fund research for a cure? You can only sell those once.
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>But it wouldn't be a cure, just a very effective lifelong treatment.
Why would any fat cat want to fund research for a cure? You can only sell those once.
Maybe they would want to fund research for a cure if they (or someone they loved more than money) were also infected?
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If clinical trials are successful, one treatment could be effective enough to replace the multiple therapies they currently need.
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It appears that "one treatment" refers to a single medicine (as opposed to the several currently required), not a single dose.
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"One Treatment" might mean removing stem cells from the patient, cultivating them in a lab to introduce this new protein, then surgically implanting them in the patient's bone marrow if I heard what the researcher said correctly. It would only need to be done once, but its not gonna be a single pill or injection either. :P
Although at this stage who knows. It does mark a major breakthrough if it works. Hopefully no one gets a patent on it
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Um... Doesn't that WP article actually prove you wrong while corroborating just about everything the GP said?
From the linked FA in your own post:
Schmidt, an only child, was born on February 24, 1967, in Missoula, Montana, where his father Dana C. Schmidt was a fisheries biologist. When he was 13, his family relocated to Anchorage, Alaska.
Schmidt attended Bartlett High School in Anchorage, Alaska, and graduated in 1985. He has said that he wanted to be a meteorologist "since I was about five-years-old" but "... I did some work at the USA National Weather Service up in Anchorage and didn't enjoy it very much. It was less scientific, not as exciting as I thought it would be—there was a lot of routine. But I guess I was just a little naive about what being a meteorologist meant." His decision to study astronomy, which he had seen as "a minor pastime", was made just before he enrolled at university. He earned his BS (Physics) and BS (Astronomy) from the University of Arizona in 1989. He received his MA (Astronomy) in 1992 and then PhD (Astronomy) in 1993 from Harvard University. Schmidt's PhD thesis was supervised by Robert Kirshner and used Type II Supernovae to measure the Hubble Constant.
At Harvard, he met his future wife, the Australian (Jenny) Jennifer M. Gordon who was a PhD student in economics. In 1994, he moved to Australia.
So, Australian citizenship or not (I assume he has it by now), it's kind of a stretch to accurately describe the guy as Australian.
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I don't know about "true Australian" but I'd imagine that Australians would take the most pride in successful Australians who are not just citizens but whose genius could be argued is in part due to having been raised in Australia during most of their formative years. It would be dumb for Americans to point to Einstein's US citizenship as evidence of America's greatness or as an example of what great people America produces.
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This will never get approved (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:This will never get approved (Score:5, Informative)
A big contributing factor toward why Australia's medical research is so strong at an international scale is the fact it's often academic and/or ultimately government funded.
The Australian government doesn't care about big pharma (which doesn't have an especially large presence in AU, relatively speaking) making profits, it cares about better health care for it's people, so they live longer, work longer, and pay more taxes.
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Re:This will never get approved (Score:5, Informative)
A big contributing factor toward why Australia's medical research is so strong at an international scale is the fact it's often academic and/or ultimately government funded.
The Australian government doesn't care about big pharma (which doesn't have an especially large presence in AU, relatively speaking) making profits, it cares about better health care for it's people, so they live longer, work longer, and pay more taxes.
Big Pharma are around, I used to work next to the Pfizer factory in Perth but they have three huge hindrances in Australia.
1. They aren't allowed to advertise prescription medicine.
2. They aren't allowed to offer payola to doctors for using their drugs. Both the doctor and the company get busted if they get caught.
3. Generics are readily available. Instead of buying Panadol (Tylanol) I can get Brand X paracetamol/codeine which is the same recipe but 1/4 the price. The same is true for most prescription drugs.
Re:This will never get approved (Score:5, Interesting)
1. They aren't allowed to advertise prescription medicine.
2. They aren't allowed to offer payola to doctors for using their drugs. Both the doctor and the company get busted if they get caught.
You've just described the developed world... except for the USA and New Zealand.
Everyone else has strong limitations on direct-to-consumer-advertising, or an outright ban.
3. Generics are readily available. Instead of buying Panadol (Tylanol) I can get Brand X paracetamol/codeine which is the same recipe but 1/4 the price. The same is true for most prescription drugs.
As it turns out, generics aren't necessarily equivalent to the original perscription drug.
Since it's late, you get the first article I found on Google [medpagetoday.com]
It's a fair representation of the other articles I've read on the subject.
The TLDR version is that generics don't always make the same amount of drug available to the patient
and even if they do, the drug may not be released in the same fashion, leading to early or late peaks of the drug.
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Actually AFAIK, in order for a drug to be a generic variant of the originator, it has to be within the specified limits of it's bioavailability. In other words, the generic drug has to be bioequivalent to the originator's, meaning the amount that gets into the blood stream and the peak time need to be nearly the same. Otherwise the drug won't be aproved as a generic drug by FDA, EMA (or any other org.) and one would have to make clinical trials (which as you probably know cost a LOT) in order to be able to
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Please note that this is not in contradiction to TubeSteaks reference:
Bioavailability of generic versions of epilepsy drugs was generally similar to that of their branded counterparts, but not so much when supposedly bioequivalent products were compared with each other, researchers said.
So if the generics are epsilon close to the orignal, they may (and arcoding to the article do) differ by 2epsilon from each other...
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All that anti-generic work is funded by pharma companies whos drugs are coming off patent. Bioavailability and pharmacokinetics are obviously important issues for a drug, and many companies spend a long time trying to get these right with modified relase and long acting versions etc, but once they come off patent all that work has usually been done.
Re:This will never get approved (Score:5, Interesting)
Protip: Medicines with the same Product License Number are the same. The number has to be printed on the packaging. If you compare various over-the-counter painkillers, for example, you will find that the cheap own-brand ones, the branded ones, the fast actions ones, the long lasting ones and the premium max strength ones all have the same Product License Number and are in fact exactly the same.
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Re:This will never get approved (Score:5, Insightful)
Healthy people do not just pay more taxes (which is a nice side effect, but then far from everyone pays taxes), they cost a lot less in the long run on health care. Which is the main reason many governments try to stop people from smoking, for example. And which is one of the reasons they promote sports and general exercise.
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A lot of smokers do seem to spend a good 20%-30% percent of their workday on smoke breaks, not to mention the loss of attention after the high wears off and they start to get antsy for their next fix. Of course, maybe the nicotine rush increases their productivity for a short burst and makes up for it, but I'm not so sure it doesn't just return them back to baseline. To give them the benefit of the doubt, they may actually still be thinking about their work and talking about it with co-workers as they clust
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And you've highlighted the real reason Governments want to stop its citizens from not smoking.
Of course, any argument that smokers cost more is disingenuous. That revenue, is no longer needed to support them once they are dead. So basically government wants rich people to stop smoking, but the poor could hang for all they care.
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Indeed, I'm not.
And then I don't have the feeling that the US government is a prime example of a government that takes care of its people well - of course the people living under that government generally prefer not to be taken care of ("we need guns to protect ourselves from the government" is an oft-heard sentiment).
Indeed obesity is a major issue in the US. Worse so than in (most of) the rest of the world. Always makes me wonder why that's so much more a problem over there, than in most of the rest of th
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Ok, I can't resist this one. I know it was just a mis-phrasing, but I'm going to say it anyway. Since it's biologically unlikely that the daughter in question is much more than a toddler, is her weight really a concern yet?
Re:This will never get approved (Score:4, Insightful)
It doesn't matter if it isn't approved. If there is a mechanism published in the science literature to treat the disease, someone will be able to experiment with it in another country. Think about some of the African/Asian countries who have said to hell with Western patents on drug formulas and make their own. If a country can produce these compounds then they most likely have the means to run clinical trials.
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Re:This will never get approved (Score:5, Interesting)
This would be a gene therapy treatment- using viral vector to express a mutant protein in your cells. Last year, the European Medicines Agency approved a gene therapy treatment for the first time (no approvals in the US currently). Glybera is indicated for lipoprotein lipase deficiency, a rare disorder that affects fatty acid metabolism. Glybera uses a viral vector to deliver a working copy of the LPL gene to cells; this proposed AIDS treatment would deliver a nonworking copy of TAT to infected cells in a similar fashion. I bring up Glybera for comparison purposes because it is expected to cost over 1 million dollars a patient for a course of treatment. Eventually, gene therapy may become such a routine way of creating treatments that costs will be very low. That is not the present situation.
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Wow, USD 1M per patient? I know that there are some costs to be recouped, but man, you could probably make it way cheaper by giving a grant to some university lab somewhere to make the damn thing. Grad students and some equipment are way cheaper than that, especially if there would be dozens of patients to treat.
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This is still something which would need regular 'top-up' doses, because it doesn't actually kill the virus but simply prevents it from affecting the immune system by making the immune cells (the HIV's target) inhospitable for the virus to live in. The trouble is that if HIV is able to infect even a single cell before the treatment is given, it actually splices its entire genome somewhere into the DNA of that cell, and at any random time some hormone or environmental factor might cause that section of the D
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The second phase of the treatment, then, would be another virus that's engineered to detect whether a cell is infected, and blow it to pieces if it is. The engineering part is admittedly a bit hard :)
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Nevertheless, despite the latent DNA in cells, people have been completely cured of HIV.
Perhaps there are drugs which reverse latency and "flag" infected cells to be killed?
I think, in the case of tuberculosis, a drug which does that would shorten treatment. The TB mycobacterium, if I remember right, goes dormant with not much metabolic activity, hence why you must have a months-long treatment regimen for a cure. If you can force the TB to "wake up", then you can kill it off quicker with other drugs and s
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They have a choice between selling someone a whole life really expensive medicines (well not to make, but to buy) or cure him.
No, medicine company A have the choice between becoming filthy rich by producing a more efficient AIDS medicine, or let medicine company B keep their revenue. The obvious choice should be clear.
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why would big pharmacy want to produce this?
PR.
Here at Pharmacom, we had a decision to make - we could either treat the disease, or cure it. We could have made a lot more money treating the disease, but we decided to make the world a better place instead.
And then, only release treatments for the other 4600 diseases they have cures for, so they can seem like they really are a good company*.
*Good company = one that makes money.
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This is a good argument for public-supported drugs (Score:2)
Probably vaccine development, antibiotic development, and curable disease drug development ought to be run BY the people FOR the people. I.e., Government support of the research and development.
It would also lessen the motivation to pass off bad drugs onto the people for profit.
It's pretty insane that the US has a $600B military budget, when less than 10k people in the US die a year from hostile military action of any sort, yet 100k-ish US-ians die every year from antibiotic-resistant bugs. Can we have $1
Re:This will never get approved (Score:5, Informative)
See here. [phdcomics.com]
I would suggest you refrain from making idiotic remarks about subjects you have no clue about.
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Cancer is not one disease but many many diseases under the same banner. In fact, the same type of cancer can be completely different diseases in different people.
Just because cancer is a category for many different diseases does not mean we can't cure them one at a time. An emerging technology that could change the outcome for cancer patients is DNA sequencing of tumor vs. healthy cells to determine precisely which medication is effective for treating a specific kind of cancer. Such DNA sequencing is dropping rapidly in price, and is likely to make its way into clinics soon.
See here. [phdcomics.com]
I would suggest you refrain from making idiotic remarks about subjects you have no clue about.
Point taken, but I''m not sure you make a good case when you cite a comic.
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Are you even remotely familiar with what PHDComics is? Based on your tendency to reject content based on form, you limit the knowlegde that you can obtain. Open your eyes.
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Sometimes when people say stupid shit, like ClickOnThis, they ask for a sanctimonious tone in reply. They didn't get enough of it at home, it'd seem. Not every comic is the same, and I agree with Suhas.
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Curing each cancer individually is the same thing as curing each patient individually because almost every person's cancer is caused by a different mutation, particularly once it really gets going, when it mutates like crazy due to the fast, unregulated divisions.
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Are you even reading the papers? Big business of all sort, with their execs earning multimillion dollar salaries, are almost always, it seems, involved in either big-scale wasting of money, or big-scale defrauding of someone -- pick from investors, clients, competitors, ... There's uncalled paranoia, and then there's the sad fact that we have psychopaths running the corporate world and politics.
Re:This will never get approved (Score:5, Insightful)
As a business why would I want to cure a person when I can keep making money by offering lifetime treatments?. That's just how it is with big Pharma, most intelligent people know this.
Big Pharma is actually more than one company, and company A doesn't care whether their cure for disease X makes the treatment of company B irrelevant.
If they started actually curing everything, their profits would fall and the markets would tank.
Because people can only get cancer once, and old people are not a better stream of revenue than young people, because Alzheimer medicine is not expensive.
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"Because people can only get cancer once"
Eh? Wtf are you talking about?? Plenty of cancers are curable now but that doesn't mean you can't get it (or a different cancer) later on!
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Anyway, I might have been slightly sarcastic, trying to show that the GPP's line of reasoning required some pretty unrealistic assumptions.
Still a long ways to go (Score:5, Insightful)
Just starting animal trials. Too early to know if it's really going to work.
Re:Still a long ways to go (Score:5, Interesting)
Just starting animal trials. Too early to know if it's really going to work.
The preliminary results of the animal trials are startlingly good, and in an interview the chief researcher said he believes the approval cycle will be short (ie: less than 5 years) because of the probability that this therapy will pass safety trials etc. We'll have to wait and see of course.
question on the cure (Score:2)
TFS has a quote that refers to changing an AIDS virus protein. How is that accomplished?
Thanks for any insights.
Re:question on the cure (Score:5, Informative)
Gene therapy, in short. They would infect you with a virus (probably a retrovirus, ironically enough) that carries a mutant copy of the HIV-1 Tat gene. Normal Tat is a gene that drastically increases HIV production. HIV hijacks the machinery of human T-cells to make copies of its own genes. The protein that Tat codes for has a nasty trick- it binds to transcription factors in your cells and and increases their output- more HIV production, which includes more Tat production, which causes more HIV production, and the disease explosively progresses. It is thought that reaching a critical mass of Tat is a key element in the transition from HIV infection to AIDS. But if you had a mutant Tat that counteracted this activity, HIV production would only occur at a baseline rate- you'd never get that Tat-HIV-Tat positive feedback.
Here's the article abstract [liebertpub.com] which has some of the technical details. MLV is the murine (mouse) leukemia virus.
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Thanks for the info, reverseengineer. I am just a layman reader of textbooks on the subject. This sounds like protein(s) that are associated with some cancers that have a mutation for overtranscribing something that helps the cancer grow.
The retrovirus sounds a little more random than I thought would be done. Wouldn't some HIV have to incorporate the retrovirus into their own RNA to produce the modified protein which would then affect further transcription? What about all the HIV in the body that doesn't in
Re:question on the cure (Score:4, Interesting)
I can't say for certain without full access to the paper, but based on the use of a retroviral vector and Dr. Harrich's comments in the video interview, I think the idea would be to infect a population of your hematopoietic stem cells with retroviruses that carry the Nullbasic (mutant copy of Tat) gene. That procedure would be similar to the autologous HSC transplants used in treatment of some leukemias and lymphomas- but then they'd infect the HSCs with the retroviral vector before they put them back in you.
Upon successful infection, the RNA genome of the vector is converted via reverse transcriptase to a DNA sequence. The vector will also produce some enzymes that will integrate the Nullbasic-DNA gene into the DNA genome of your stem cells. If successful, those cells will now produce Nullbasic protein. Since they are stem cells, they will produce Nullbasic-positive blood cells, some of which will be the CD4+ T-cells that HIV infects.
HIV will still infect these cells, inject its RNA genome into the cell, which will be converted to DNA, integrated into the host cell genome, transcribed back to RNA, then translated to viral proteins by the cell's machinery. However, the host cell also makes Nullbasic protein, which act like HIV's Tat, and will interact with the same enzymes, transcription factors, etc., but instead of boosting their functions, it will inhibit them. In theory, HIV would reproduce so slowly in your population of Nullbasic+ T-cells that it simply wouldn't be a disease- the population would never fall to the point of causing immunodeficiency.
The phrase, "in theory" could also apply to most of the other steps I outlined above, of course.
The more the better (Score:2)
There have been a few announcements about a "cure." I hope one of them sticks. This is another interesting finding using a vaccine [thestar.com].
*Not* a cure (Score:2)
and ultimately cure the disease.
For a treatment to be a cure it has to eliminate the virus from your system, and what is described in the summary doesn't seem to be that.
So I did the unthinkable and actually read the TFA (I know, I can't believe it myself). To the credit of the summary in it the reporter does claim that it's a cure. However just a couple of paragraphs over a scientist in the team is quoted as saying:
"You would still be infected with HIV, it's not a cure for the virus, but the virus would stay latent, it wouldn't wake up,
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It's a cure for AIDs, not a cure for HIV. AIDS is a disease that involves an immune deficiency, the virus is just the precursor to that. If they prevent the virus from being able to destroy your immune system, then they have effectively cured you of AIDs, but not HIV. Since AIDs is what kills you, not HIV, this is a huge step forward if it pans out.
another one (Score:2)
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I believe this is cure for AIDS #3 on slashdot. Cures for cancer are at about 14. Cures for aging in general, at least 4. I think solar panels are at about 1000% efficiency too if you add up all the stories.
You get a mutated AIDs/Cancer 50 petawatt laser cannon? Sounds awesome.
Is this scary? (Score:2)
Ok, anything that stops AIDS is great, don't get me wrong. I really do hope this works. But, can a person undergoing this therapy spread HIV? My guess is it is a lot less likely but still possible but that is an amateur, uneducated guess.
If so, what happens when the world is no longer afraid of AIDS but this medicine is still patented. No doubt it will be extended as many times as possible. Maybe they will even find a way to patent it in parts, staggered over time too.
Don't get me wrong, free love for all
I'll believe it when I see it (Score:2)
I've been hearing about groundbreaking AIDS cures for at least 20 years. Sometimes, they're bold enough to tell us the production cure is a mere 5 years down the road. Meanwhile the researchers get flooded with investment dollars and we slowly forget about the claims. Same thing with cancer cures.
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So you only want to hear about research that turns into actual products do you? You're not very curious... Me, I want to know about every new thing out there.
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Like announcements that a rediscovery of some 18th century quack physics leads that "may lead to a possible way to make batteries with 500% more storage capacity" - the key work is may. It also may not, but you wont know till the money si all gone.
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If you don't care about herpes or one of the many other sexually transmitted diseases, sure. Knock yourself out.
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In all likelyhood you already have Herpes and warts. The infection rates are staggering. Most people never develop symptoms unless their immune systems are weakened. The clap and such are a bit more rare but easily treatable now-a-days. HIV was a whole other animal however, but with this discovery it looks like it might turn into no more a threat than the other STDS are... an embarrassing trip to the doctor.
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Just to amplify your comment with a list,
all herpes infections are lifelong and incurable,
and chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis are becoming
drug-resistant.
Furthermore, even if you manage to be cured of
chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis, you could still
suffer permanent damage from having been infected.
--PM
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Just to simplify your comment with not a list:
And none of these KILL you.
Thanks!
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I'm pretty sure those trials were ended early and the lower infection rate was mostly due to guys not engaging in sexual activities while they healed from the procedure. Afterwards they probably also noticed their sexual pleasure being reduced as the foreskin has a great deal of nerves and protects the head of the penis.
I never knew the greatness of foreskin due to doctors and my parents decided something that should have been left up to me to decide, but these guys will probably regret their decision.
So wh
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Maybe that method is true, but it seems to be seldom tried!
--PM
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There have been posts about the methodology of the trials, I don't think there's that big a problem.
Bear in mind that circumcision is a common tradition among African tribes, they do it at an initiation ceremony at around 11 years old or so. As to whether this is right or humane or whatever, I'm not going to venture an opinion.
But, there are also tribes which don't practise it, so there's more than enough opportunity to find a control group. The fact that it was performed years ago removes the influence of
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How is HIV passed from women to men? Does it go down the man's urethra and somehow into his bloodstream? How, exactly? How much HIV is present in vaginal fluids, and how much, if any, vaginal fluid, goes down a man's urethra when he is having sex?
Did any of you idiots bother to THINK about basic stuff like this?
You clearly haven't, since all you're doing is asking the questions. Why don't you go out and find the answers? Then come back and present a little thing that the rest of us like to call "evidence."
I'll do the first one for you. The second one is your homework.
For HIV to be able to infect someone it has to cross through the mucosal membranes (the skin that lines the vagina, cervix, rectum, urethra (hole where urine/pee/semen comes out), mouth, nose, etc).
Contrary to popular belief, there does not have to be a cut or a tear in the membrane for HIV to pass through (though the presence of such will increase that persons risk should they be exposed).
I got that from Yahoo! Answers, fer chris'sakes. It's not heard.
Do some RESEARCH
Good advice. Why don't you follow it?
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I got that from Yahoo! Answers, fer chris'sakes. It's not heard.
Hah. Not hard, obviously. Stupid fingers.
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Haha, Oh my days.
As a doctor in the UK who has worked in the largest centre for HIV in Europe (Chelsea and Westminster hospital, at the GUM/infectious diseases centre there) I can tell you that fewer people are dying of AIDS for the exact reason you mock, drugs are saving their lives. These aren't wonder drugs, and they aren't nice drugs for your body in many ways, but they do work well.
Here's a great page describing the HAART and modified HAART regimes that we mostly use nowadays http://emedicine.medscape.
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Wow, that's the 'perfect medicine' think of the money that must bring the drug industry!
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Ever heard of Koch's postulates, AC?
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Obviously you have never had sex.
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The cold virus and most other viruses are not dependent on a protein that boosts transcriptiuon of the virus like apparently HIV is.
Otherwise you would have a universal blockage of production of any virus.
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I wish I was very young and everything was new and exciting. That is how truly new things get done/invented/developed.
Sometimes things get done when the old codgers get sick of the whippersnappers fouling things up, and the codgers take over and show 'em how to do it.
... but that's a young man's game.