Advance in Quest for HIV Vaccine
 

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...p_mostpop_read

I hope something can come from this, like a CURE!

If not a cure, atleast a vaccine so we can drastically cut back on new HIV cases and try to get ahead of the disease.

have they ever figured out what actually causes the infection? Not how it's spread, but how it's created?

For example, can two homosexual men that both test negative for it have all of the monogamous, unprotected sex they want without risk of infection? Can two intravenous drug users that both test negative share all of the needles they want, only between themselves, without the risk of infection?

Personally, I think the sooner they find, or at least admit (if you listen to some conspiracy theorists), they'd be a hell of a lot closer, if not complete in finding the cure.

The answer to the above is yes -- two negative people cannot "create" HIV. No one really knows with certainty how HIV came to be.

CDC HIV/AIDS WTF

They already have a cure: money.

http://tellmewhyimwrong.files.wordpr...ic-johnson.jpg

Exactly. And didn't they recently come out and say that "Patient zero" wasn't really patient zero?

That's a fact.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ga%C3%ABtan_Dugas

Ah thanks, I thought so.

/not even going to try and get into the origins

Wait, what?

How exactly would the Wolverine Origin Story (h/t Michael Bay) "complete" finding a cure? The virus is not impossible to isolate - we know what it is. The methods of transfer are similarly possible to isolate - as it is with almost every blood-borne virus.

We can create flu vaccines without knowing which primordial ooze created influenza. Why would AIDS/HIV behave any differently?

What is your background in biomedical engineering?

I frankly don't have any, so if you know something I don't know which makes your "Personally[comma]..." worth any more than mine, please do share.

Because influenza is a virus, and HIV is a retrovirus. All I know is that they are different, though i can't tell you why.

Well, yes. That wasn't the point though. He means that we don't need to know the origin of HIV to be able to create a vaccine. HIV is obviously much more difficult to develop a vaccine for because of how fast it mutates and I'm sure a bunch of other biomedical reasons I don't understand either, but we don't need to know the origins.

But WaxOff apparently thought it was possible for HIV to spontaneously occur between non-infected drug users or gay men and thus I wouldn't even have gone as far as to question his opinion on this either.

I read it as saying why we can't treat HIV even though we can make vaccines for influenza without knowing it's origins.

Nah I think he was just questioning WaxOff's claim.

"We can make vaccines for the flu without knowing where it came from, we don't need to know the origins of HIV to be able to vaccinate for it because we can already isolate it."

Ah ok that makes sense. Rhetorical questions and me do not go together well. Also the methods of transferring HIV have been known for a while. And there are at least theories of how it was started if not any proof.

Good god, are people still this clueless about AIDS nowadays? I think this why it's still such a problem, because the initial shock factor has worn off, and people can now get drugs to live a relatively long life, so it doesn't seem like such a big deal, so people aren't educating themselves. IT IS A BIG DEAL. REAL. BIG. DEAL.

But people believed it up to the 19th century! Why not today?

(And though I've heard that there may be an increase in unsafe-sex as treatment for HIV and AIDS has advanced, I think the biggest issue is it's still seen as a disease that people 'deserve' to get because of their actions.)

Consider the source, the people that think that the AIDS virus is "created" via gay sex or intravenous drug use also probably think that humans were "created".

I am asking questions to debunk myths based on how the disease is spread versus created. I'll admit that I'm not educated as much as I'd like to be on the topic of HIV and AIDS. But over the years I've heard conspiracies and theories and blatant bull@h!t about what the virus is or is not. Everything ranging from "it's God's curse on the gays" (Bull$h!t) to the introduction of a different Y chromosome into the bloodstream (theory) and even it being a product of government funded chemical warfare (conspiracy theory).

But in the 25-30 years since the outbreak really took off, no one has ever come forward and said "We have found that the virus is created by conditions x and y combined with agitation from z." I may not have a degree in biomedicine, but how is it illogical to think that knowing what creates the virus can help find its cure? Don't you have to know what's wrong in order to fix it?

We don't need to know what creates the virus. From my understanding doctors still don't really understand how viruses are even possible and do what they do. That being said they now how to help protect against them.

Of course, lots of people who know that the AIDS virus is not "created" via gay sex or intravenous drug use also think that humans were "created." Even many who accept evolution still would say humans were "created." :rolleyes:

That's really the wrong way to look at it. A virus isn't created, unless you're talking about how it first came to be. A virus is transmitted. An organism that is host to the virus transmits it to another organism. And we know how it's transmitted.

Viruses are not created by conditions. Viruses mutate. It could be that the virus mutated from a harmless form to what is now the AIDS virus. Mutation is a random process. The viruses with "successful" mutations multiply. See natural selection.

There is not really an excuse for you to think that viruses spontaneously appear following the swapping of needles or engaging in sex. You're theoretically college educated. I don't believe that you asked it to dispel the myths of others.

HIV somehow mutated and spread to humans 30ish years ago (or spread to humans before that and mutated into its current virulent form later). The fact that we don't know the details of that mutation incident doesn't change the fact that it happened. (It doesn't even matter if it was intentional - tin foil hat - or not.) The flu did the same thing, the cold did the same thing. The reasons we can't vaccinate for HIV but can for the flu have nothing to do with its origins and everything to do with its mutation rates and the characteristics of retroviruses. Not to mention the public perception of HIV as a 3rd world /bad behavior disease.

The two examples I gave are two of the most common ways the virus is transmitted. Correct? I could've listed other ways to swap blood and other bodily fluids if you like. For instance, are we sure that clean blood transfusions or organ transplants are safe? What if some of the viruses in this world are caused by the body trying to reject the foreign substance? Can you tell me with 100% certainty that they are not?

But getting to my point, which I failed to bring across, is the virus, any virus has to start from somewhere or something. They have their own specific genetic makeup. Their own DNA. If scientists can trace the DNA of our species and countless others back to their origins, why can't they do it with this or any other virus? Why can't they then use that information to help fight it?

Seriously. How did you pass biology? DID you pass biology? You're on the internet, it is full of information. Go read some of it before you come back and try and talk about it again.

Be careful who you say that to. I believe in the creation theory as a Christian, but I by no means think the HIV was created by gay sex, IV drug use, or as a means to get rid of undesirables or an entire race of people. Further more, regardless of behavior, no one deserves to contract the HIV virus or any other kind of illness.

We can agree to disagree, but I find your "created" comment to be outrageous.

Agreed to the above. I believe that humans were "created", but I don't believe that HIV was magically created to punish the sinful.

Re: creationism.... what's up cognitive dissonance?

/thread.

Creationism is one of those words that has become narrowed over time, now almost exclusively associated with fundamentalism and a particular view on creation vs evolution.

Belief in creation and belief in evolution are not mutually exclusive. Theories of theistic evolution (fairly widely accepted in Catholicism and mainline Protestantism) and evolutionary creation have been around almost as long as the theory of evolution. Darwin even essentially posited theistic evolution in his earlier writings, though he later backed away from that.

I took a class on HIV/AIDS this year. We do know the origin of the virus, it comes from SIV - the primate version of HIV. But that doesn't matter as far as finding the cure goes. HIV is a retrovirus, it permanently embeds itself in the DNA of every cell it infects. Every time a cell multiples, the HIV multiplies. They have, however, been experimenting with cutting out the portion of DNA where the HIV exists, but this would obviously be very difficult to do on the entire body. HIV lies dormant in cells for years and it just hides itself in mass quantities in certain areas of the body. At this point a cure is a long way away, IMO.

not a big surprise, but it's relevant to this conversation.

In US cities, HIV linked more to poverty than race - AP

Study Links HIV, Poverty - WSJ
http://sg.wsj.net/public/resources/i...0718221225.gif

Yes?

The mechanism for rejecting foreign bodies (specifically w/re: organ transplants) is so well-known that we have drugs to help prevent it (with varying degrees of success). Just because the immune system is attacking the new liver, for example, does not believe the liver is acting in the same way as a virus.

Put another way: your immune system will attempt to break down a splinter that is stuck in your finger. That does not mean that the splinter is causing a virus, right? Why would you assume, then, that other interactions with the body/immune system would "cause" or produce a virus?

We can map the genomic structure of HIV pretty easily. You seem to miss the point though - the human genome has been "mapped" fairly successfully for years, but that doesn't mean humans have been "traced back" to some origin point. Wouldn't it be nice if we did? All those Texas schools could get back to actually teaching proper biology of evolution . . . what a world.

However, just because we know the physical structure, that doesn't magically unlock a cure - everything in science exists in context, and the context in which HIV exists (namely, the human body, and more specifically attacking the immune system) is inordinately complex.

I worked in a virology lab that worked with gene therapy techniques for cancer treatments - we did extensive work with HPV, a much simpler virus than HIV. You'll notice that HPV vaccines are just now becoming prevalent, and only for the most important strains - that's after nearly 30 years of work. Cancer and HIV both encounter a key problem: how do you stop reproduction without killing the host? How do you interact favorably with genetic mutation/insertion in ways that don't feature consequences worse than or on par with the initial issue?

For every one assay that shows any success, 25 fail - and no amount of historical knowledge would really affect this at all. Ever. Mapping the structure of HIV has been done. Finding the origins would be largely a fool's errand, one that is MUCH more important for epidemiologists and sociologists than for those looking for a cure.

For a moment, I pondered whether WaxOff confused the reaction of our bodies to viruses with the virus itself as those reactions are indeed our bodies fighting something off. Then I realized that this combined with his previous comments suggests HIV showed up by gay men's bodies trying to fight off gay sex and creating HIV.

And I concluded he was still an idiot.

LOL!

Wow...how did I not read this thread sooner? Funny. Going back and looking for the roots of the HIV virus wouldn't help much with a vaccine mainly because the mutations are what we have to fight against, not the original non-virulent strain. There are so many viruses on this earth that were previously non-virulent that suddenly began killing humans, ie. EBOLA, Influenza, West Nile, Polio. I could go on and on and on. All it takes is a successful mutation to make the virus able to run wild through the human body until reproduction of the virus (the ultimate success) kills off the host.

But don't you know HIV is just a virus made by the government to distract us from the lizard people taking over the New World Order before changing our currency to the AMERO and making us all convert to Islam?

/adjusting my tin foil hat.

Shhhh....if we use big words like evolve and virulence, no one will see what we are doing.




Look at the monkey! Look at the monkey!




See it works everytime!

So there is a vaccine entering final testing... a few more years if this is successful then?

http://www.lanl.gov/news/stories/aid...l_testing.html

Are there any viruses that can be cured?