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New antibody attacks 99% of HIV strains

bbc.com

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Re: New antibody attacks 99% of HIV strains

#141

Post by rangibaby »

loeg wrote: post #80
jessriedel wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the 1980s, getting HIV was a quick death sentence. It has never been quick. > Without treatment, average survival time after infection with HIV is estimated to be 9 to 11 years, depending on the HIV subtype https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV/AIDS#Prognosis You may be thinking of the ~1 year survival times after an AIDS diagnosis, but HIV is usually latent for a decade after initial infection.

In the 80s HIV wasn't really diagnosed until it had reached the AIDS level, was it? AIDS itself was first diagnosed in 1981 and HIV wasn't isolated until 1983 and didn't have that name until 1986. I've tried to do a brief search for earliest HIV (non-AIDS) diagnosis, but many websites use AIDS and HIV interchangeably.

"And The Band Played On" might have something about it. I don't remember because I read it a lot time ago.

Re: New antibody attacks 99% of HIV strains

#142

Post by chimeracoder »

wickawic wrote: post #101
MechEStudent wrote: post #93

HIV evolves with amazing (super-villian-ic) speed. Many "cures" attack 99% of cells, or similar. Resistance is evolved during treatment, and is usually uniform within just a few months. It mutates/evolves so fast that given just virus samples, it is possible to determine sequence of infection. I think it needs to kill more than 6-9's before it has a good chance at being a cure.

I'm sure that it is much more complicated than this, but I wonder how long the virus can remain immune to all previous '99%' cures? Maybe eventually we could come up with enough of these and then administer them all at once.

> I'm sure that it is much more complicated than this, but I wonder how long the virus can remain immune to all previous '99%' cures? Maybe eventually we could come up with enough of these and then administer them all at once.

That's basically what HAART (the technique we've used to treat HIV successfully for the last 25 years) is. People take three antiretrovirals simultaneously. They're designed such that, for the virus to adapt to one, it has to make itself more susceptible to one of the other two.

Re: New antibody attacks 99% of HIV strains

#143

Post by SirZimzim »

alreadyhere wrote: post #64
namelost wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if there were a perfect HIV cure, and antibiotics were 100% effective, there is a risk of infertility from chlamydia, etc. So no, unprotected sexual freedom isn't a practical goal for medical science. Better to use condoms instead.

Unprotected sexual freedom is completely a practical goal; condoms work well but many choose not to use them, for better or worse. Prevention doesn't even need to center around eradication of the disease; it could come in the form of home detection kits. For better or worse people will always have unprotected sex with strangers. It's a thing. I'm a little tired of the disconnect between medical advice and reality whe…

Maybe in the age of nanobots will we have practical ways to allow for unprotected random sex.

Re: New antibody attacks 99% of HIV strains

#144

Post by toast0 »

jahnu wrote: post #130
joshstrange wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that it helps Africa but in the US for a drug like Truvada (PrEP) it costs ~$1500/mo on insurance but they offer a copay card that covers $3600/yr which is enough to hit my deductible at least so after 2 months I only pay $30/mo but in practice I don't pay a dime because the copay card covers it all.

Honestly, when you US folks talk about how your medical bills work and are paid there is so much jargon and complexity it sounds like Star Trek techno-babble to my ears. "I have a common but chronic ailment so all I had to do was re-route the phase-converter to the deflector shield and invert the chromaton particles in Shelk-Einstein space and we're done!" :/

This is the real heart of the healthcare cost problem in the US. No party in the process knows how much anything costs, so it's unsurprising that costs go up so fast. This wouldn't be tenable in an individual pays environment, or in a government pays environment, but in the US environment where many people get coverage from employment we end up in this crazy system where there are so many parties involved in payment, that nobody knows what's going on.

In this case, the patient (A) may be getting the drug from a pharmacy (B), and the pharmacy bought the drug from the manufacturer (C), but the patient's insurance (D) is paying part of the cost of the drug, but so is the manufacturer, and insurance is paid for partially by the patient, and partially by the employer (E). There may also be direct government subsidies, and there are certainly indirect subsidies as well. Of course none of the 5 parties can really know how much anything costs, or how to reduce costs. Not to mention all the extra labor involved in administration of this complex system.

Re: New antibody attacks 99% of HIV strains

#145

Post by andriesm »

sethrin wrote: post #118
matwood wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, herd immunity is an interesting concept and one the anti-vaxx people completely hose up. For example, a measles vaccine doesn't work on a small percentage of the population. Herd immunity says though that as long as some large percentage of the population is immune, those which the vaccine do not work will be fine. The anti-vaxx people end up pushing the percentage vaccinated below what's required for herd immu…

I was thinking that we need a stronger term than idiot, but it occurs to me that this behavior is actually criminal. It causes grievous harm to one's society, which is the criterion for criminal behavior. Therefore if social pressure is not sufficient to correct this behavior, legal means will need to be employed.

What about people's individual rights? I don't want the community to tell me what to inject into my body? (Ps I am NOT anti-vax)

Re: New antibody attacks 99% of HIV strains

#146

Post by refurb »

astura wrote: post #71
1jojojo wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Herpes wasn't considered a disease at the time. It was not pathologized until later.

This is more or less true. The pharmacy company Burroughs Wellcome is largely blamed for pathologizing "genital herpes" starting in the late 70s. https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/ypa8nb/did-big-pharma...

Wait a second. With heroes you get painful, oozing sores on your genitals. It sometimes never goes away and can flare up at any time.

Does it really take a company to make people think of it as a disease?

"Oh my penis feels like it's on fire and oozing all over me. However, I wouldn't call it a disease."

Re: New antibody attacks 99% of HIV strains

#147

Post by OneTimePaddy »

geofft wrote: post #112
bad_user wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Isn't sexual freedom a goal? You always have the risk of undesired pregnancy and the best cure for that is the condom, since birth control pills are basically hormone bombs, not very healthy for women in the long run, or you could undergo surgery, which is invasive and not without peril. So just use the condom already, those minty ones are actually cool. And if we don't have "sexual freedom" it's probably because t…

> birth control pills are basically hormone bombs, not very healthy for women in the long run I've heard this a few times but I'm curious for sources on the fact that they're not healthy. They're certainly not natural, but, like, living until you're 80 years old isn't particularly natural either. Do you mind expanding on this?

Birth controll pills basically emulate a serial pregnancy- so im curious where this is suddenly unnatural.

Re: New antibody attacks 99% of HIV strains

#148

Post by sethrin »

andriesm wrote: post #145
sethrin wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking that we need a stronger term than idiot, but it occurs to me that this behavior is actually criminal. It causes grievous harm to one's society, which is the criterion for criminal behavior. Therefore if social pressure is not sufficient to correct this behavior, legal means will need to be employed.

What about people's individual rights? I don't want the community to tell me what to inject into my body? (Ps I am NOT anti-vax)

Rights can be said to have a real existence only to the degree that society dictates, and only in a social context. Your will is not inviolate simply because you choose to frame it as a right. So the first answer to that question is that it must first be established that this is some sort of right that society has agreed to respect, and secondly you would have to take on the issue of the harm to society in order to argue whether the one or the other was more important.

Vaccinations are indeed something of an affront to one's physical person. So is collecting DNA evidence. I think that you will find upon further reflection that the physical integrity of one's body is not much affected by a vaccination, and that personal liberties do not extend to causing grievous bodily harm to others.

Re: New antibody attacks 99% of HIV strains

#149

Post by api_or_ipa »

MechEStudent wrote: post #93

HIV evolves with amazing (super-villian-ic) speed. Many "cures" attack 99% of cells, or similar. Resistance is evolved during treatment, and is usually uniform within just a few months. It mutates/evolves so fast that given just virus samples, it is possible to determine sequence of infection. I think it needs to kill more than 6-9's before it has a good chance at being a cure.

Reminds me of a lesson about misleading statistics I tell my nephews. We've all see the hand sanitizers that advertize killing 99.99% of germs, but what does that actually mean? 99.99% equates to 1/10,000 survivors and assuming for each generation the population doubles means it takes just 14 generations for the original colony to be back at full strength again. For extra creepy effect, e coli can reproduce in optimal conditions as fast as every 20 minutes which buys you only a couple hours of hygiene[0].

Given this drug kills 99/100 HIV virus units, then this really only helps you for log2(100) or ~7 generations

The math is pretty easy, but the results are something that always surprise me: it turns out humans are pretty bad at estimating exponential growth.

0: real life conditions are probably slower than this, I concede.

Re: New antibody attacks 99% of HIV strains

#150

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

chimeracoder wrote: post #142
wickawic wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure that it is much more complicated than this, but I wonder how long the virus can remain immune to all previous '99%' cures? Maybe eventually we could come up with enough of these and then administer them all at once.

> I'm sure that it is much more complicated than this, but I wonder how long the virus can remain immune to all previous '99%' cures? Maybe eventually we could come up with enough of these and then administer them all at once. That's basically what HAART (the technique we've used to treat HIV successfully for the last 25 years) is. People take three antiretrovirals simultaneously. They're designed such that, for the…

> They're designed such that, for the virus to adapt to one, it has to make itself more susceptible to one of the other two.

That's not really accurate. HAART works because the 3 drugs are taken simultaneously, and it's extremely unlikely for a virus to get random mutations that confer resistance to all three in one generation.

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