Via shadowandlight, an article on a promising AIDS vaccine:
After getting three under-the-skin injections of the tailor-made vaccine, the amount of HIV in the patients’ blood (called the viral load) dropped by 80%. After a year, eight of the 18 patients still had a 90% drop in HIV levels. All patients’ T-cell counts stopped dropping.
Why hasn’t this received more press? Does anyone who knows more about this than me care to comment? Is this just another small step, or should I start making my Cure Day party plans?
EDIT: More here.
hadn’t heard anything about it all, but i have been flaking a bit in the news department since i’ve had other crap on my plate…
but that is indeed intriguing news, and i’ll need to do a bit more research myself!
“Laboratory experiments with a similar vaccine that showed great promise in monkeys have slowed after further studies showed the virus was able to mutate into a vaccine-resistant strain.”
True, we’re not monkeys, but still, better to have solid proof than to create a new, even more elusive strain of it to be released into the general public…
I don’t know, maybe they don’t report on it since it was in France or something.
That would be fan-frelling-tastic if that were to pan out in tests, and I’ll keep my eyes open for any further developments.
Caution….
I would advise cation.. I remember a couple of times in the past when similar things happened, but the virus merely mutated and then came back witha vengeance..
Also.. as the article notes–this is not a true vaccine–i.e. something that you take that then makes you immune to the virus itself… This is more like taylor made immune system booster treatment…
In any case.. I’m fairly pessimistic about us ever finding a “cure” for HIV…unless we figure out how to make things like nano-machines that we inject and that hunt down the virus and kill it individually…
I hold this view mainly because of what I know about Cats.. Basically, from what I understood from this nova show on them, a scientist who was working with cheetahs and lions got all freaked out one day after doing some blood tests and realizing that some of her cats all had this immuno-suppressant virus in them.. She feared that they would all croak soon–but it became clear that they were doing fine and remained healthy. Then she tested all of her cats and discovered that they all had it–and further tests have shown that almost every single wild cat has the virus.. but it doesn’t afffect them.. Doing further genetics work–they have come to the conclusion that about 10 million years ago, this AIDS like plague hit the feline population and killed like 98% of them–but 2% were immune due to a genetic mutation and all current felines are descended from them…
Add to this, that there is just such a kind of immunity in humans–specifically, about 1/6 caucasions appear to be totally immune to HIV–they can be exposed to it intimately, yet they never develop any symptoms and their bodies destroy the virus… This group has a genetic mutation that keeps the virus from ever getting a foothold onto our immune system.. Interestingly, this mutation has been traced back to a group of Europeans–who mainly originate around what used to be called Silesia–i.e. very central European polish/German–who also were basically immune to the Bubonic Plague–this region never suffered from the Black death at all while it trashed the rest of the world…
Interesting, isn’t it…
Thus.. my main conclusion is that eventually, after a long period of massive death–those who have the mutated gene will become dominant and AIDS will cease to be a threat…
Not that this is going to help us anytime soon… figure like 200 years minimum–and that’s only if we all don’t die from drug-resistant TB first… :\
Re: Caution….
You really think that will happen? Seems to me that more and more, modern medical technology tends to keep that kind of selection from happening. Sure, it’s happening in Africa; but in other parts of the world, between safer sex and various treatments, it seems like there will always be a ready population of nonimmune hosts.
Re: Caution….
I’m not so sure.. HIV infection rates are rising again the US… I don’t know if it will ever get as bad as it did with the cats.. but then again–in terms of their selection pressures–we are talking about a process that probably lasted 10,000 years at the very least…
Do I think that in 10,000 years everyone will probably be immune to HIV–yeah.. I can see that as likely.. (200 years was far too soon, I now realize..)
In terms of perspective.. we still really haven’t seen the atrocity that is about to happen in some parts of Africa–In places like Botswana, 35% of the population is infected… They haven’t started dying in truly horrific mass numbers to induce civilization collapse in those parts–but that could be seen within our lifetimes.. (the fact that the President of South Africa, until just recently, was going around stating publically that HIV had nothing to do with AIDS doesn’t bode well for that country either…)
As for medical science–I believe there are limits to it.. What might solve the whole thing a lot faster would be genetic engineering where we just figure out how to give expectant mothers a little pill that manages to mutate only that one little gene without mucking anything else up…
Now that would be the cure, in my view.. Because in actuality, we have had very very very little success in actually eradicating viruses… Smallpox and polio are the only real “successes” .. but there is definite evidence that smallpox is actually probably out there still ….
Thus.. instead of finding a particular “cure” from medical science, what I think we need to figure out is how to make the damn viruses irrelevant to our lives…