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New HIV vaccine shows unprecedented success in preclinical study

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Re: New HIV vaccine shows unprecedented success in preclinical study

#291

Post by greggsy »

fluoridation wrote: post #148
greggsy wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t prep more like a prophylactic, as opposed to a a vaccine? I’m more familiar with malaria, where the preventative medicines are currently more effective than the vaccines.

"Prophylactic" is a broad-enough word to encompass vaccines, as well, so I'm not sure what you're getting at. It just means something that defends against disease.

Vaccines can be singled out as a specific type of prophylaxis.

The distinction is that a vaccine will train your immune system to actively destroy the foreign body, while a prophylactics might just prevent it from spreading or taking hold to begin with.

Re: New HIV vaccine shows unprecedented success in preclinical study

#292

Post by tempfile »

shadowtree wrote: post #207
dahinds wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the original assertion is "punching down" on poor people. While you're correct that poverty isn't the "only reason" for high HIV transmission, poverty certainly contributes to it, via lack of access to health care and lack of access to education. How is it less "punching down" to attribute it to social behavior and culture? Isn't needle sharing associated with poverty, or would you also call that "cultu…

I was poor, grew up in social housing. I did not use drugs. "I share needles because I can't afford my own" is an INSANE take. Don't shoot drugs in the first place! Poor people are normal humans, they have willpower, agency. It is a rich people myth that poor people are cattle, devoid of any chance of doing the right thing. It is culture, behavior, social norms. Being poor does not force you to abandon the nuclear fa…

Being poor correlates with adverse health outcomes. If you insist (as you do) that those health outcomes are due entirely to culture and willpower, then you are forced to conclude that poor people have low willpower and are less moral. This is an unprovable assertion, based entirely on your own vibes, and is frankly a cruel thing to say. It basically asserts that these people deserve the things that happen to them, because they were avoidable and entirely due to their choices.

This is not a celebration of human agency. When people are treated badly, they behave badly. It is completely irrelevant that you were treated badly and happened not to behave badly. People are far too complex for you to say "well, we got treated the same, we should have behaved the same".

Re: New HIV vaccine shows unprecedented success in preclinical study

#293

Post by fluoridation »

greggsy wrote: post #291
fluoridation wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Prophylactic" is a broad-enough word to encompass vaccines, as well, so I'm not sure what you're getting at. It just means something that defends against disease.

Vaccines can be singled out as a specific type of prophylaxis. The distinction is that a vaccine will train your immune system to actively destroy the foreign body, while a prophylactics might just prevent it from spreading or taking hold to begin with.

I have no idea what you're trying to say. An antiviral drug will destroy the pathogen just as much as the body would; that's how it prevents the disease from manifesting. What do you think would otherwise happen to HIV particles in your bloodstream? They just hang in there until the antiviral effects run out?

Re: New HIV vaccine shows unprecedented success in preclinical study

#294

Post by rsynnott »

RGS1811 wrote: post #3

While HIV vaccine research is an exciting field, it's worth pointing out that halting HIV transmission is, practically speaking, a solved problem with oral and injectable reverse transcriptase inhibitors. The ongoing loss of life and health due to HIV could be stopped if we cared enough to invest resources in wide-scale PrEP availability and public health education. Waiting for an HIV vaccine is the domain equivalent…

While that’s _kind_ of true, in practice compliance is going to be an issue. People are bad at taking medication, especially on an indefinite basis. As is, a lot of people use ‘event-based PrEP’ (dosing only before and a couple days after potential infection). There’s a lot of room for error. A working vaccine would definitely be preferable.

Re: New HIV vaccine shows unprecedented success in preclinical study

#295

Post by rsynnott »

saghm wrote: post #180
jonathanlydall wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could say the same about teen pregnancy being a practically solved problem, except there is still the problem of teen pregnancy. Or even something more mundane as driving consistently safely all the time to solve the problem of accidents. If everyone was disciplined all the time in regard to everything, many problems in the world would simply not exist. But we live in reality where for whatever reason, people don…

> You could say the same about teen pregnancy being a practically solved problem, except there is still the problem of teen pregnancy. Or even something more mundane as driving consistently safely all the time to solve the problem of accidents. At the risk of derailing this conversation from the original topic, those two things are not remotely equivalent. There's no organized political movement trying to tell people…

Seat belts, maybe not. Some of the campaigning against the new 30km/h urban speed limits here _is_ practically framing them as immoral, tho. People get weird about that stuff.

Campaigning against _contraception_ feels like pretty much a dead issue, at least here; you just don’t see it anymore.

Re: New HIV vaccine shows unprecedented success in preclinical study

#296

Post by rsynnott »

codesnik wrote: post #211
saghm wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You could say the same about teen pregnancy being a practically solved problem, except there is still the problem of teen pregnancy. Or even something more mundane as driving consistently safely all the time to solve the problem of accidents. At the risk of derailing this conversation from the original topic, those two things are not remotely equivalent. There's no organized political movement trying to tell people…

derailing further, it's no organized political movement, and they don't call it immoral but in Caucasus region some men avoid using seat belts as "unmanly", and that's a very social thing. Small plugs into a seatbelt socket to shut up the car audible warning are very common, including taxis.

The ultimate expression of masculinity is being hurled at speed through a windscreen.

Re: New HIV vaccine shows unprecedented success in preclinical study

#297

Post by rsynnott »

shadowtree wrote: post #171
tempfile wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but we know that HIV/AIDS essentially is a solved problem in rich countries, that the mentioned interventions are readily available in rich countries, and the only reason HIV transmission is high in poor countries is because, well, they're poor. We (humanity as a whole) have plenty of money, we could fund these things, we simply choose not to. I would caution against making an allusion to self control. It woul…

"the only reason HIV transmission is high in poor countries is because, well, they're poor." This is factually untrue. Being poor does not equal a HIV transmission rate. There is no 1:1 correlation. A single protected (condom) sexual act between a male and female averages somewhere around 0.1-0.5% chance of pregnancy, and during the fertile window it could still be around 1% or more even with a condom. Chance of HIV…

I mean a big part of the issue in poor countries is lack of access to PrEP.

Re: New HIV vaccine shows unprecedented success in preclinical study

#298

Post by rsynnott »

Telemakhos wrote: post #54
nerdjon wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you are not doing risky sex it isn't for you. That blanket statement I very much disagree with. Sure there are side effects but that is part of why you also get tested every 3 months for liver issues (not that it is the only side effect, but still). Instead of it being a blanket statement it should be a conversation with your doctor about the pros and cons. You can still get HIV even if not engaging in risky beh…

You are extremely unlikely to get HIV from anything other than risky sex. That's what "risk" means: it's another word for "probability," just a probability of negative outcomes. These probabilities are known: https://www.aidsmap.com/about-hiv/estimated-hiv-risk-exposur... Some of that table is already mitigated: we test blood for HIV, so transmission by blood transfusion is unlikely. Transmission by pregnancy is less…

> Is someone irresponsible enough to pursue causal, unprotected sex with random partners also likely to be responsible enough to visit a doctor proactively and comply with a prep regimen?

Er, I mean, a decent portion of gay men in the developed world, honestly. (I say this as a gay man in the developed world.)

Re: New HIV vaccine shows unprecedented success in preclinical study

#299

Post by rsynnott »

kstrauser wrote: post #168
freeone3000 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are unaware of any situations where HIV+ doesn’t turn into AIDS without treatment. But being HIV+ is simply having a virus, not actively dying. HIV+ status also never clears - later tests that are “negative” mean your viral load is undetectable, at which point you can no longer transmit HIV to others. Undetectable = Untransmissable.

That all makes sense. A couple things I’m still not clear on: * If someone has a negative test after treatment, but that’s not counted as “cured”, does that imply it could (or maybe will ) come back if treatment is stopped? * What’s the importance of the distinction between HIV+ vs AIDS, from a public health or human perspective? We don’t talk about influenza+ vs “has the flu”, at least as far as I know. Does HIV+ ca…

> What’s the importance of the distinction between HIV+ vs AIDS, from a public health or human perspective? We don’t talk about influenza+ vs “has the flu”, at least as far as I know. Does HIV+ carry less stigma than AIDS?

Generally if you have the influenza virus, you’ll also have the disease that that virus causes. This is true of most viruses. I’m not sure any other virus does the “undetectable and untransmissible, but still _there_” thing; generally, if you get viral load to undetectable for most viruses, it will go away entirely. HIV is unusually good at dealing with the human immune system.

Re: New HIV vaccine shows unprecedented success in preclinical study

#300

Post by ck2 »

nephihaha wrote: post #237
ck2 wrote: post #163

The timeline of HIV/AIDS discovery to treatment to "cure" is fascinating to me I distinctly remember Reagan cabinet members openly joking about all the people dying from it in WhiteHouse press briefing (basically Trump before Trump prototypes) * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_HIV/AIDS Now if they could just do this for me-cfs/long-covid and related auto-immune diseases (there are over eighty) without the 5…

I knew someone who claimed they had encountered AIDS as a doctor in late 1960s London. I don't know the truth of this, of course, and the person concerned has passed away. I do know that some illnesses present similarly, but it's not impossible. I am sure these diseases are around for a while before people identify them properly.

in early 2020 people would show up in the covid forums and warn about what would become long-covid that they had experienced for TWENTY YEARS since 2003 from SARS-1

I suspect sometime in the 2030s we are going to go through all this again as there won't be any investment into making a cure, there's not enough profit

wastewater analysis in major cities shows covid is alive and well, just not in the news anymore because not enough dropping dead from it, but lifelong chronic fatigue and pain is still on the table for many

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