Posted on 01/19/2013 1:03:37 AM PST by nickcarraway
Australian Researchers Believe They Have Found Cure for AIDS A team of researchers believes that they may have found a cure for HIV by A team of researchers believes that they may have found a cure for HIV by turning the virus against itself.
While treatment for HIV has become more successful than ever before at evading AIDS, AIDS remains a threat. In fact, the majority of people infected with HIV will not progress to AIDS for 10 to 15 years, according to Avert, and antiretroviral therapy can delay it even further. However, antiretroviral therapy is expensive and has a multitude of side effects. One team of researchers from the Queensland Medical Institute in Australia believes that they may have found a cure for the syndrome by turning the virus against itself.
The team focused its research on a protein called Nullbasic, which the HIV virus needs in order to replicate. They were able to modify the protein in order to significantly inhibit growth, and their findings have worked every time they have conducted the experiments. While the virus would still exist in a person's system, it would be unable to develop into AIDS and individuals could maintain a healthy immune system. The therapy would mean that HIV would never deteriorate into AIDS, spelling an end to onerous drug regimes. That, in turn, would mean that people infected with HIV would have a better quality of life and government and consumer costs would decrease.
"If this research continues down its strong path, and bear in mind there are many hurdles to clear, we're looking at a cure for AIDS," study author David Harrich said in a statement.
Animal trials of the protein are due to begin this year.
An HIV patient is believed to have deteriorated into AIDS if their CD4 immune system cells drop below 200 per each microliter of blood. The development of 22 HIV-related infections and cancers also mean that the patient is characterized as having full-blown AIDS.
34 million people were infected with HIV in 2011, up from 33.5 million cases in 2010, according to the United Nations.
The study was published in the journal Human Gene Therapy.
People are susceptible to AIDS in the first place because they're immune compromised. Non HIV infected homosexuals get many diseases and have a high hospital admittance rate, so maintaining a healthy immune system is a relative term.
The article is incomprehensible, but perhaps they are altering the virus via molecular engineering to render it non-pathogenic.
That’s one of two possible approaches. The second is somehow activating latent virus (all of it at the same time), coaxing it out of macrophages and T-cell precursors (somehow), and then killing it conventionally.
There has been some (very early) progress along path #2, I haven’t heard of any progress with #1. As I said, the article itself is meaningless and I have no idea what they are describing.
There are some places in Africa where the infection rate is well over 90% of the adults.
This is a common notion, and is often applied in other areas, as with the notion that the car companies conspired to cover up the 70 mpg carburetor.
The problem is that it shows a total lack of understanding of market economic incentives.
If a cure for cancer were discovered tomorrow, the market for all drugs treating cancer would plummet. But the company that came up with the "cure" would make immense sums of money.
The notion that this company would keep the cure quiet is therefore based on the idea that it would avoid making a lot of money for itself in order to protect other companies in the industry.
Does not compute.
Similarly, any car company that came up with a device that doubled mpg would make immense sums by putting it into its own cars and licensing it to other companies.
Their deep-sixing it is based on the peculiar notion that they'd pass up immense wealth for themselves in order to protect the profit margins of the oil industry as a whole.
Again, does not compute.
Adam Smith covered this in detail in Wealth of Nations. Industries have an incentive to conspire against the public good by price-fixing, but any single company that breaks the pact benefits itself. So the incentive is for them to cheat, which makes price-fixing much more difficult to enforce. In fact, absent government or other coercion, it is essentially impossible.
I believe this is also covered by Game Theory, where there is usually an inherent conflict between what is best for the group and what is best for an individual within that group.
If only I could have a dime every time it is in a news again (for 20+ years and counting).
I have MS. After many years, I'm slightly jaded when it comes to the pharmaceutical companies, and even medical research. Sometimes I wonder if they want to find a cure, which is sort of impossible till you find a cause, and that has never been determined.
There's so much money to be made on the treatments (which cost boatloads of $$$, have a general success rate of 33-50% in slowing down the number of exacerbations, but evidently not preventing diability, and have a myriad of side effects, some of them fatal.)
While I did not explicitly state that, my hope is the same as yours.
AIDS is not a disease as much as it is a civil rights status. If it had been treated as a disease from the get-go it never would have run as rampant as it did.
They're making a big claim for something that hasn't started animal trials yet. Good luck to them anyway.
Yea, I’m very much into natural remedies myself. I love earthclinic.com
It sounds to me as if they will just be swapping one antiviral therapy for another. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
It sounds to me as if they will just be swapping one antiviral therapy for another. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
And HIV is only one of many diseases that sodomites are prone to. News is coming out recently of an incurable form of gonnorhea. .
And HIV is only one of many diseases that sodomites are prone to. News is coming out recently of an incurable form of gonnorhea. .
And HIV is only one of many diseases that sodomites are prone to. News is coming out recently of an incurable form of gonnorhea. .
They would be swapping one anti-viral therapy that requires a person to take three different expensive drugs at fairly precise intervals every single day (and if you get it wrong, it reduces effectiveness of the treatment or can actually be dangerous), and which have side effects, for an anti-viral treatment that in the majority of cases would only need to be given once, and then the person is treated for life (or at least until an actual cure comes along that destroys the virus).
Taken only once? Where do you see that in the article?
It's not in the article - as I said in an earlier post, I went to a Q&A with one of the scientists involved in the research.
If this works, they will use gene therapy to alter a person's genes so that their own body produces the protein that prevents HIV developing into AIDS. That's a complicated treatment but it's a one off treatment. Similar treatments are already in use for a few other diseases, but they are complicated, which is one reason why there are still questions as to whether or not this will pan out as a successful treatment.
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