What do you think should be done about the HIV/AIDS epidemic? What do you think the government should do? What we (youth) do to help?

Yeah, there's theories that it developed in monkeys in Africa (think "Outbreak" the movie, but with AIDS and in real life) because there is an SIV (Simian Immunodeficiency Virus) as well.

I'm glad you appreciate the article - it's so awesome. My only worry with that sort of vaccine is, since it's so personalized, that no one will want to spend the money on the millions of people that have HIV/AIDS to help fight it.

Stupid politicians and their wars.

Oh yeah, there is a conspiracy theory, actually a few, on how and where HIV/AIDS originated. Here's just one website:

One Theory

LOL

HIV/AIDS is the worst terrorist ever. So about that war on terror....

Wow!!! That's awesome! Thanks for posting that!

Okay, I found it. This article is the one that a friend of mine posted in their livejournal, but since you have to sign up for some weird trial to read it, here's the article in full:

Human Test: Novel Vaccine Stops HIV
Treatment Turns On Anti-HIV Immunity, Holds AIDS Virus in Check

By Daniel DeNoon

Reviewed By Charlotte Grayson, MD
on Monday, November 29, 2004
WebMD Medical News

Nov. 29, 2004 -- It worked in mice. It worked in monkeys. And now in humans, a therapeutic vaccine has stopped HIV in its tracks.

The vaccine is made from a patient's own dendritic cells and HIV isolated from the patient's own blood. Dendritic cells are crucial to the immune response. They grab foreign bodies in the blood and present them to other immune cells to trigger powerful immune system responses to destroy the foreign invaders.

HIV infection normally turns these important immune system responses off. But animal studies show that when dendritic cells are "loaded" with whole, killed AIDS viruses, they can trigger effective immune responses that keep infected animals from dying of AIDS.

Wei Lu, Jean-Marie Andrieu, and colleagues at the University of Paris in France and Pernambuco Federal University in Recife, Brazil, tested the vaccine on 18 Brazilian patients. All had HIV infection for at least a year. Their T-cell counts -- a crucial measure of AIDS progression -- were dropping, meaning their disease was worsening. None was taking anti-HIV medications.

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.

The findings appear in the December issue of Nature Medicine.

"The results suggest that [these] vaccines could be a promising strategy for treating people with chronic HIV infection," Andrieu and colleagues write. "The significant decrease of viral load as well as maintenance of ... [T-]cell counts observed at one year after immunization are particularly promising."

The researchers warn that their study is only proof of principle. It's still not clear which patients do best with the vaccine, although there's evidence that vaccination should be given as soon after HIV infection as possible. Only clinical trials comparing people who get the vaccine to those who don't can show whether this vaccine really is an effective AIDS therapy.

Similar approaches are being explored for the treatment of cancer and long-term viral infections such as hepatitis C.

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Originally posted by VoiceofAmerica:

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Originally posted by activistista:
VoiceofAmerica: oh how wrong you are indeed! Of course HIV/AIDS is vital for the government to be involved in! Its a worldwide EPEDEMIC! Billions upon Billions of people are affected by this, so it is the government's problem. If the government didn't spend money on helping this cause it would just spread and spread until we would all have this terrile disease. I suggest reading up on the matter.

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AIDS/HIV for the most part is a disease that is spread by personal choices, and unless people devlop a little self-control AIDS is going to spread, and its going to spread not because it is the governments fault, but because the people keep making choices in thier lifestyle that is dangerous to thier health, and as a result of the fact that it comes about by choices of the people, they and not the government should be responsible for AIDS.

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Hey! Im new and have no idea what i'm doing but I do have an opinion about this!! Most of the ppl who have aids in Africa are children whose parents had it and was passed on to them. That is not a childs "personal choice." Im not saying its the governments fault but the government should take a stand. America spends millions of dollars on a war because terrorist killed thousands of americans but we can't help fight the aids crisis that kills MILLIONS every year. Just because someone lives America their life isn't more important then a African childs.

I'd like to know the name of this so-called "vaccine". Also, where did you hear about it? Can you post a web-site or article? Many researchers have claimed that they have the vaccine, but they have not actually been put on the market-and there is always a reason why. But if you really believe there is a vaccine, I'm sure interested in reading into it.

There is actually a vaccine to HIV. It's newly developed and the scientists that did it are up for the Nobel prize or something (hummm wonder why!)

Anyway, the way it works is it takes the cells that detect viruses and send messages to T-cells (I can't remember what they're called exactly) and basically builds the virus vaccine according to a person's specific detector cells, and in the trials they've done, within a year the patients have had a 90% increase in their T-cell numbers, and their viral load has dropped by an average of 70-80%.

Gay cancer is SO last century.

It isn't incurable-there's no proof to support that! There is more evidence right now saying that we have the possibility to cure it than there is against the possibility! AHHH!!

Yeah northstar basically went into details of what I said. It's incurable. But there is a possibility of a vaccine.

What I am saying is it does not mutate its DNA, but its protein casing, wso that it cannot be recognised by antibodies. They can change the shape and size of protien chains randomly so that the antibodies that were produced to go against the old "strain" will not work. That is why it is impossible to cure it. I think it was in a school movie I saw (my mom's a biology teacher, )

AIDs is a virus. We aren't even sure if viruses are living, and they have no cure. So yes, there's a possibility to find a vaccine, but there is no cure for AIDs.

I doubt it does because
a) I see no sources backing it up
b) if it mutated every few seconds, in a few days it would be so different from the original product.

I could be wrong, I will admit that. I've never heard of this mutation in seconds. I know it can mutate, but I was under the impression that it took much longer than that.

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I doubt it mutates in seconds

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I also heard somewhere that it does, although that may have been on these boards...

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Originally posted by yogore:

I doubt it mutates in seconds.

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I have a feeling I read somewhere that it does. It can change the outer coating of proteins in it's surface, so that it would not be recodnized by the antibodies or white blood cells. It's one of its more ingenious defences.

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there seems there will never be a cure for it, because it can mutate in seconds to become immune to any vaccine.

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I doubt it mutates in seconds.

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But until then half of the world could have AIDS

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Well, the whole world could get AIDs. No one's ammune to it. Without a vaccination, there is no way to stop it besides cutting down on risks with condoms.

"there seems there will never be a cure for it, because it can mutate in seconds to become immune to any vaccine."
I also hope they will find a kind of vaccine...someday. But until then half of the world could have AIDS

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Because there is no possible vaccine

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I wouldn't say that. I'm sure we will find something with proper time and funding. People used to say there was no possible way to cure cancer, but we're much closer.