11–20 of 47 posts
how is this hacker news moroon
Being fairly young, I can not remember a time in my life when a disease was cured or a vaccine created that significantly reduced transmission. I keep expecting a grand announcement like "AIDS cured" or "Cancer defeated" but there are always so many caveats that it feels like progress isn't being made. I wonder if it was the same way with other diseases in the past, and I am just being important, or if modern day one…
HIV mutates incredibly quickly, which makes it incredibly hard to find a "vaccine", because something that works against one strain probably won't work against the others. The same goes for treatments - most HIV patients have to take a various combinations of drugs (the slang term is their "cocktail") which vary in effectiveness both per-patient and over time.
Cancer is difficult for a different reason altogether: it's the body's own cells. To oversimplify, it's (relatively) easy to find a medicine that can target foreign cells, but it's hard to find a medicine that will target cancerous cells and not be equally deadly (or more deadly) to healthy cells, because cancerous cells so closely resemble healthy ones.
Progress is being made - just look at Bill Gates and his campaign for eradicating polio.
Being fairly young, I can not remember a time in my life when a disease was cured or a vaccine created that significantly reduced transmission. I keep expecting a grand announcement like "AIDS cured" or "Cancer defeated" but there are always so many caveats that it feels like progress isn't being made. I wonder if it was the same way with other diseases in the past, and I am just being important, or if modern day one…
HIV and cancer are particularly tricky. HIV mutates incredibly quickly, which makes it incredibly hard to find a "vaccine", because something that works against one strain probably won't work against the others. The same goes for treatments - most HIV patients have to take a various combinations of drugs (the slang term is their "cocktail") which vary in effectiveness both per-patient and over time. Cancer is difficu…
Being fairly young, I can not remember a time in my life when a disease was cured or a vaccine created that significantly reduced transmission. I keep expecting a grand announcement like "AIDS cured" or "Cancer defeated" but there are always so many caveats that it feels like progress isn't being made. I wonder if it was the same way with other diseases in the past, and I am just being important, or if modern day one…
I was born in 1985, the year that AZT (the first effective anti-HIV drug) was patented, since then we've developed a whole spectrum of anti-retroviral drugs and turned HIV from a death sentence to an unpleasant chronic illness. The advances in anti hepatitis drugs are similarly enormous.
If you're over 20, then basically any non-generic drug sold in the US was developed in your life-time.
For those of you too young to remember the 90's, AIDS meant sure death in very few years. It was worse than cancer: with some cancers, you stood a chance. How far we've come :)
"With no signs of the virus for 10 months..." Does this mean that the virus could still be incubating in cells and some sort of stressor could cause the virus to come out, similar to those that have had Chicken Pox getting Shingles later in life? If so, is it really a cure? To me, a vaccine that has passed all trial stages and works almost 100% and w/few side effects is a cure. I don't want to belittle this miracle,…
A vaccine is not a cure. It's prevention - which already exists for mother to child HIV transmission. Anyway, the doctors don't make any absolutely definitive statements, but: "Now, after at least one year of taking no medicine, this child's blood remains free of virus even on the most sensitive tests available" http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/mar/03/us-doctors-cur...
True.
My point was that the title of the post indicated that the child was cured. We don't know that yet, and may not know for some time. It will be nearly impossible to eradicate HIV without prevention. If this child has unprotected sex as an adult thinking that it is cured, is that safe? We don't know. Maybe the virus will show again in their adulthood.
However, if a vaccine is found and we can prove the vaccination works, that provides a lot more security. Because of many of our parents getting vaccinated, Smallpox got to the point where their children (us) didn't have to get vaccinated. That is where we need to get with HIV. Because of AZT, etc. people just assume it is more of an annoyance now, like Herpes that can be managed. We need adequate resources dedicated and I am concerned that touting a cure that may not be is not in the public's best interest.
I can't tell (from the relatively scant details) if the child ever developed HIV infection, by which I specifically mean to include infiltration of a cell by the virus, replication, and a host reaction. I can't find text in the articles describing which blood tests were done on the child. If her ELISA and Western blot are negative (still) but she initially had a nucleic acid amplification test that was positive with high titer, then it would make me wonder if the drugs, for this baby, were not necessarily the key element causing her to be disease free. I.e., I would wonder if the infant weren't actually cured because she was never fully infected in the first place.
If she was truly infected and her body was reacting to the replicated pathogen, then this early treatment strategy is extremely interesting.
For those of you too young to remember the 90's, AIDS meant sure death in very few years. It was worse than cancer: with some cancers, you stood a chance. How far we've come :)
Being fairly young, I can not remember a time in my life when a disease was cured or a vaccine created that significantly reduced transmission. I keep expecting a grand announcement like "AIDS cured" or "Cancer defeated" but there are always so many caveats that it feels like progress isn't being made. I wonder if it was the same way with other diseases in the past, and I am just being important, or if modern day one…
Same for HIV.
For those of you too young to remember the 90's, AIDS meant sure death in very few years. It was worse than cancer: with some cancers, you stood a chance. How far we've come :)
I also remember as a kid the news when Magic johnson made his announcement and thinking , dam he is gonna die really soon, not knowing that decades later he is still doing well.