HIV/AIDS cure??!!??!?

wau

http://itsnotlup.us/notlupus.png

and they still can't cure the common cold

Can anyone find a link to a better story? I couldn't

if this were real, the headline would be:

Doctors may have found a way to destroy HIV FUCKIN IN THE STREETS!

there have been many promising leads liek this... would be best thing ever if it pans out but i wouldn't fuck in the streets without a condom yet.

Not better, but some more

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/07/080729133622.htm

whew good thing you posted so soon after whiney, slocki!

a lot of it is like communism--sounds great on paper, it just doesn't work in reality.

I'll believe when I see a report from the NIH and/or the CDC

how often do they send you reports on promising new medical treatments?

I'm on a MWF schedule.

you guys know there are still hepatitis, chlamydia, babies, gonorrhea, BABIES, and syphilis? never fuck in a street without a condom. or clap-babies will get you.

for s10cki

Don't take off your condoms yet, people.

(unless you're finished fucking for the time being - then dispose of it properly, cause I don't want to see that in the kitchen trash when I'm cooking dinner)

i'd recommend not cooking dinner in the kitchen trash

for a brief period I time I did CNA work in a 6-bed HIV+ house. Weekends only. One week I came in and half the house had died on my days off, including one who'd been perfectly fine on Saturday and just started to spike a temperature when I left on Sunday evening. It's hard to describe the dread and horror of this disease if you haven't seen it up-close and personal.

I hope this treatment/"cure" is for real.

It sounds promising but Slocki was right upthread, there have been many such leads before.

damn J0hn that sounds grim. I did some HIV non-profit work for awhile but it was strictly doctors and medical journals stuff.

it was in Pico-Crenshaw in the mid-eighties. Hard times.

t's hard to describe the dread and horror of this disease if you haven't seen it up-close and personal.

yeah, i'm not saying that i've had anything like the experiences that you've had, but i vividly remember the last time i saw a very sweet man who had been battling aids for a decade-plus. at the time he looked like a living corpse, and the most disturbing thing was that he was apparently going through some phase of dementia-- like, he was extremely irritable to the point where carrying on a conversation with him was just inviting yourself to be snapped at.

a couple of months later my ex-girlfriend called me in tears to tell me that she had just found out that he died. alone. in a hospital room. great.

might watch coil's tainted love video again now

...like, he was extremely irritable to the point where carrying on a conversation with him was just inviting yourself to be snapped at.

My then gf and I used to take food over to a family friend who was nearing death and he was like this.

I have the most irrational animus against this virus. The 80's made me hate it virulently.

no clinical trials, no credibility

Mr. Que sadly OTM

xpost - ^^ Yes.

I have the most irrational animus against this virus. The 80's made me hate it virulently.

Same. Even though I was just a kid, I grew up on Fire Island in the 80's and saw many of my parents' friends/community members die horrible deaths way too young.

In college I volunteered for an organization that delivered meals to homebound people with AIDS. I couldn't cope with developing a relationship with the clients only to lose them so I stayed behind the scenes in the kitchen.

Hence five question marks in the thread title.

xp

you need to answer for the three exclamation marks.

Because if true, very exciting.

My uncle died of AIDS in November 1995, a few months before the cocktails became available. Since he was in the Army my grandmother didn't pay a dime for his care, but the toll was, shall we say, enormous. He only began to deteriorate in the last few months of his life, but he was a husk of a man on the night before his death.

Oh Jesus, Alfred. So sorry.

:(

And, as far as I know, he was heterosexual.

This is the sort of conversation that gets me in punk-rock fuck-the-government mode - a the height of the crisis you couldn't squeeze funding out of Washington for shit. More important to fund the "Afghan rebels." Gaaah it made me mad then and it makes me mad now.

fucking Reagan

Reagan didn't even say "AIDS" in public until 1985 by which point there were already thousands on known deaths.

The epidemic in the U.S. might have been totally different things been done differently and action taken by the gov't much sooner.

The epidemic in the U.S. THE WORLD might have been totally different things been done differently and action taken by the gov't much sooner.

seriously when people talk about what a great president Reagan was that shit makes me see bloodred

Ok yes, true. Things didn't really get going globally until 2003-2004 in terms of US involvement so I suppose that would have happened a lot sooner had things been different right from the beginning.

I was just asking my wife about this, since until recently she'd worked a couple years in an HIV research lab at Hopkins. She sounded pretty skeptical, but couldn't say much for certain since the article kind of dumbed down the science of it to the point that she can't tell what they're doing here that's unique. But apparently there's a lot of false alarms in that whole community, what seems like a breakthrough one year often gets refuted by another lab a year later. I don't know why a guy like this doctor would speak to the press about this in terms that would get people so wound up before they've even gone into human trials, I guess it's hard not to get excited by any sign of hope.

I think it's way too easy to just blame Reagan -- or at least it's potentially misleading: AIDS was a radioactive subject, and practically no one in the government wanted to touch it with a ten-foot pole for years. Reagan did a shitty job of dealing with the issue in any kind of prompt or compassionate way, and believe me, I'm no fan of his presidency.

But I don't think most of the other politicians in Washington from 1982-1985, say, would've behaved all that differently -- And the Band Played On talks about this a little bit. America itself just kind of failed.

yeah there's plenty of blame to go around, Reagan was just top of the heap. And the Band Played On is a great book.

Agreed. On both points.

Low Estimates

Just in case you were getting too hopeful.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/...n4652168.shtml

Nobel Winner: HIV Vaccine Within 5 Years
Therapeutic Vaccine - For Those Already Infected - Would Be Step Toward Preventative Shot

(CBS/AP) One of the scientists sharing the Nobel Prize in medicine for discovering HIV said Saturday he believes there will be a therapeutic vaccine to treat the virus within five years.

Luc Montagnier, of France, told reporters in Sweden that he believed it was "a matter of 4 to 5 years" before a therapeutic vaccine to treat HIV infection is developed. He did not elaborate as to why he believed scientists were close.

Scientists have developed lifesaving drugs that can inhibit the disease, but there is no vaccine to prevent or treat HIV infection. Finding a vaccine has proved elusive in the past, with the most recent trials ending in failure.

However, a therapeutic vaccine would be a key step in fighting the virus, he said. A therapeutic vaccine would be given to people who are already infected, in order to lessen the impact of the disease while a preventative vaccine would, ideally, protect people from HIV.

So far, scientists have focused on drugs to fight the disease because they have been proving effective. In developed countries, AIDS has become manageable, rather than fatal, because of the drugs.

HIV was first identified 25 years ago, but still poses difficult challenges. Scientists cannot explain, for example, why it causes the immune system to collapse.

Montagnier, together with other Nobel laureates, began arriving in Stockholm on Saturday ahead of a week of Nobel festivities that culminates with a lavish banquet and awards ceremony Dec. 10.

The 76-year old scientist shares one half the $1.2 million prize with 61-year-old Francoise Barre-Sinoussi, also of France, for their research on HIV. The other half goes to Germany's Harald zur Hausen, 72, for showing a viral cause for cervical cancer.

Sweden's King Carl XVI Gustaf will hand over the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Wednesday along with the awards in chemistry, physics, literature and economics. The Nobel Peace Prize is pr

sorry try this link: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/12/06/tech/main4652168.shtml

http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/09/24/hiv.vaccine/index.html

Researchers have tried to prevent the spread of HIV since they discovered its cause in 1986. Previous vaccine trials failed to prevent infection. And during one trial, the vaccine seemed to boost the chance of being infected, which ended testing early.

this is why science sometimes creeps me out tbh

because it doesn't always work?

Pretty much; you get to the human trials and sometimes you fuck people up with what you're trying to accomplish.

testing vaccines ethically is a pretty dicey area.

Dicey as in uncomfortable, but not as in seriously questionable. It's gotta be done.

Also I know crap all about stats but is 74 vs 51 HIV cases out of the control vs vaccine groups really that big a difference?

Dicey as in uncomfortable, but not as in seriously questionable. It's gotta be done.

― this must be what FAIL is really like (ledge), Thursday, September 24, 2009 9:56 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

not questionable, but difficult.

s1ocki and me on the same page here

74 vs 51 = 30% less so yea i would say that's quite a big difference?

ok but including size of the groups, about 8000 each, that's like 0.9% vs 0.6%.

ya but not every single person was exposed to HIV!

i mean that's the only way to ethically test that vaccine - otherwise you'd haveta just take 1000 people and expose them ALL

yea i dont think the size of the groups is that relevant.

xp I know that! Yeah, anyway. Never mind.

exactly, who was in the clinical trial pool? 'we rounded up 100 heroin-shooting transexual hookers"?

Um . . . rates of HIV infection in Thailand are shockingly high and I believe AIDS is the leading cause of death among adults or at least it was up until very recently.

How high is "shockingly high"? I ask because fewer than 1% of the participants in this study contracted HIV regardless of which group they were in, so it seems that there was some self-selecting behavior amongst the participants that protected them from infection as much or more so than this vaccination. ("seems" being the huge word here; everything goes back to my question of how they controlled the variables)

We actually weirdly had a lecture on retroviruses followed by a lecture on antiretroviral medications today, and both professors were pretty excited (but still guarded, since the details of the study are not quite out yet) about this. I think a lot of what got them excited was less the quantitative drop in infections (our Pharm professor actually said something like, "Basically they dropped the infection rate from 0.4% to 0.3%") than as a proof of concept for the idea of a combination HIV vaccine, something that could be refined and made better over time.

To me at least, the excitement about this sounded like how they described the introduction of AZT therapy twenty years ago. AZT by itself only works for about six months (since HIV mutates so rapidly), and didn't really reduce viral levels or increase T cell counts so much as it kept things stable and prevented things from getting worse. But that was still something significant, and it led to more refined antiretroviral medications, and then they found other drugs that worked on other viral targets, and then they started using the drugs in combination therapies, and now it is becoming a real possibility for HIV-infected people to die of something totally unrelated to AIDS.

thailand has a ~1% infection rate among adults so it looks like that lines up with the study. that makes them 49th in the world.

Which is still pretty high overall but yes in line with the study.

I think it's a little higher than 1% but maybe there is newer data.

I really wish I was still at my old job and could ask my old boss what he thought of this. He's a researcher who deals largely with HIV/AIDS patients in Tanzania and other Sub-saharan African countries. Would be interesting to hear his thoughts.

In Australia, since they've been doing post-exposure phrophylaxis (basically, if you've been exposed to HIV, you start taking the AIDS cocktail within 72 hours, and keep going for a month), not a single person who has adhered to that regime has contracted HIV. They haven't been able to do full controlled tests, of course, since no ethics committee is going to let you deliberaterly infect people with HIV, but still, it surprises me that this isn't better known.

They use PEP in the US too but I think one of the problems with PEP is that not only is it not a commonly known thing but it's very expensive. I believe that it's generally only used if someone has had an extremely high risk encounter with someone who is definitely known to be + or say a needle stick incident among health care workers.

Here it's free and given to almost anyone who needs it, but it's not at all advertised.

I believe that the CDC does recommend PEP for ppl who seek treatment <72 hours after a known exposure yet this is still not widely publicized here either. I think that this might be due to both cost and a concern that people might being to think of PEP as a sort of "morning after" pill for HIV which might, in turn, encourage risky behavior. That might be one of the reasons that it's not well advertised. Also the side effects of ARVs can be pretty extreme and many people who begin taking PEP drugs discontinue them because of the side effect. Doing so could obviously lead an someone who had been exposed to seroconvert or develop resistance to the meds.

Official word from the CDC summed up well in the summary here but it's basically what I said above: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/rr5402a1.htm

And this sorta sums up the would a campaign to publicize PEP lead to more risk taking debate - it's certainly an interesting question: http://www.thebody.com/content/prev/art25263.html

Here it's free and given to almost anyone who needs it

it makes me madder every day that we can't have this

So the results of that study are actually barely statistically significant:

http://www.layscience.net/node/640

i hope you're happy now

:(

Raindance film festival shows and heartily endorses AIDS denialism film:
http://gimpyblog.wordpress.com/2009/10/04/film-festival-endorse-aids-denialism/

the new humanist dudes are fucking cranks.

it's interesting it was shown at cambridge – also shown were a film about how creationism is unfairly maligned in US schools (!) and another on how the US government, not big oil, is the cause of climate change (or something). my guess is these festivals are having trouble making money and are effectively being subsidized by whoever makes these films.

really h8 raindance tbh tho, bunch of trustas.

Ugh, I'll be angry if this gets on TV, still angry about that climate change denialism film being on primetime TV so for the next several months I had to listen to people going "oh well actually it's all a con" and then a year later when the damage is done put yr little tiny blurb on at 3am saying "by the way, broadcasting standards have found the film to be factually inaccurate"

barely statistically significant

I dunno, I agree that this is borderline and not worth throwing parties in the street for yet, and I am totally skeptical re pharmaceutical testing methods in general, but picking a 95% confidence limit for statistical significance and then handwaving about "barely statistically significant" even when it's in seems to miss the point of picking the limit in the first place. Even though said skeptic may well turn out to be right yet, alas...

Yeah I'd agree with that.

it's interesting it was shown at cambridge – also shown were a film about how creationism is unfairly maligned in US schools

I presume that was 'Expelled'. Looks like it was shown, along with the AIDS film, as part of a debate on science and denialism. I'm sure it was critically presented as an example of partisan film-making, I think anyone in this country would have trouble taking a creationism film seriously. They were less critical with House of Numbers, but have admitted their error.

¯\(°_o)/¯

http://bloodjournal.hematologylibrary.org/cgi/content/abstract/blood-2010-09-309591v1

HIV entry into CD4+ cells requires interaction with a cellular receptor, generally either CCR5 or CXCR4. We have previously reported the case of an HIV-infected patient in whom viral replication remained absent despite discontinuation of antiretroviral therapy after transplantation with CCR5{Delta}32/{Delta}32 stem cells. However, it was expected that the long-lived viral reservoir would lead to HIV rebound and disease progression during the process of immune reconstitution. In the present study, we demonstrate successful reconstitution of CD4+ T cells at the systemic level as well as in the gut mucosal immune system following CCR5{Delta}32/{Delta}32 stem cell transplantation, while the patient remains without any sign of HIV infection. This was observed although recovered CD4+ T cells contain a high proportion of activated memory CD4+ T cells, i.e. the preferential targets of HIV, and are susceptible to productive infection with CXCR4-tropic HIV. Furthermore, during the process of immune reconstitution, we found evidence for the replacement of long-lived host tissue cells with donor-derived cells indicating that the size of the viral reservoir has been reduced over time. In conclusion, our results strongly suggest that cure of HIV has been achieved in this patient.

i know zero about this, fwiw, so i don't know if this is reputable or what.

Aids was ages ago, i remember the advert.
Isn't it MRSA or something similar now?

I just read the manuscript. So in the opinion of someone who has no background in Heme/Onc, Infectious Disease, or bench science, is prone to misread things, and is currently only 62.5% of a doctor...

--The science makes sense. Patient had Acute Myelogenous Leukemia. The treatment for leukemia is ablating all the host white cells and then transplanting in hematopoietic stem cells from someone else, which in theory would destroy all the cells that HIV infects. The trick of the delta32/delta32 cells that were transplanted is that they do not express the CCR5 surface receptor that HIV binds to, so any HIV left around has no way to bind to the grafted white cells. Just a really clever way to do a bone marrow transplant.

--Except, and the authors acknowledge this, HIV can also bind to another white cell surface receptor, CXCR4, and so the stem cells can be infected through that route. So it is possible that the infection could persist, it just...didn't, for this guy. I am curious what his/her HIV status was beforehand, since this seems like it'd be way more effective in the early stage infections where the virus is mostly CCR5-tropic.

--If it does turn out that giving HIV patients the same treatment you give a leukemia patient is a consistent cure for HIV infection, you'd really run into a fascinating either/or: bone marrow transplantation comes with a pretty substantial risk of morbidity and mortality, which is acceptable in acute leukemias because otherwise the patient is pretty much done for. But with HIV, a well-controlled medication regimen makes HIV a chronic illness, rather than a thing that will lead to your imminent death. So if you're in that situation, would you take the possible promise of a total cure, which comes with a whole truckload of possible complications, or do you go with indefinite HAART therapy (which has its own set of complications, although not to the extent of the bone marrow graft), with a reasonable chance of dying of something else twenty or thirty or forty years later?

Without knowing the economic difference between the two options, I'd be inclined to favor indefinite medication therapy, myself, but that's just me.