Antiretroviral
sa smith | July 11, 2014Of course, SciBlogs is in the middle of a Wordpress update when this news breaks:
'Mississippi Baby' now has detectable HIV, researchers find
Some of you might remember last year, when there was exciting news about a baby, born with HIV, who had subsequently become HIV- thanks to an alternative treatment strategy (basically, give babby HAART ASAP).
The end of last year, the physicians associated with the babby finally published some of their observations.
This led to a rush of 'Me too!' physicians, either trying the same approach, or reporting on their previous HAART attempts. Theres nothing…
sa smith | May 5, 2014The first and second baby, apparently 'cured' of HIV after being infected at birth, lived in the US. In the US, the standard treatment for an at-risk baby is wait for a firm HIV diagnosis before administering HAART. But when Baby #1 and Baby #2 got HAART ASAP, they are functionally 'cured' of HIV, and there was hope that this aggressive approach would be able to help the >200,000 babies infected with HIV every year.
Well, in Canada, the standard treatment for potentially HIV+ babies is the more aggressive approach that 'cured' the two babies in the US.
So, after US physicians announced…
sa smith | April 1, 2014Long-time readers of ERV know that I am not a fan of Pre-Exposure Prophylactics as a regular means of preventing HIV infection. In tightly controlled clinical trials, giving people who might be exposed to HIV anti-HIV drugs does lower infection rates... but when the same protocol is let loose 'out in the wild', the results are not as good. Some are disastrously bad.
And thats just following infection rates-- Thats not even addressing the long-term effects sub-optimal levels of antiretrovirals has on the HIV population.
A major problem with 'The Pill' to prevent HIV is that people do not take…
sa smith | March 22, 2013The News in HIV the past few weeks has been the same message: Get people tested. Get people antiretrovirals.
It saves lives.
YAY!!!
KINDA! FOR NOW!
Test and Treat in Los Angeles: A mathematical model of the effects of test-and-treat for the MSM population in LA County.
This group of folks looked at a very specific question: What are the anticipated effects of ASAP HIV testing and ASAP antiretrovirals in the homosexual community of LA? If we start implementing this strategy now, in 2013, what will the HIV landscape in this community look like in 2023?
First, the good news--
The people who are…
sa smith | March 20, 2013In A Perfect World, everyone who was infected with HIV-1 would be tested and treated.
1-- People with access to antiretrovirals live longer.
Increases in Adult Life Expectancy in Rural South Africa: Valuing the Scale-Up of HIV Treatment
I really like the introductory paragraph to this paper:
For most of the 20th century, life expectancy increased in nearly every part of the world (1). However, from the late 1980s, the HIV epidemic led to a reversal of this trend in southern Africa, with a large rise in mortality among working-age adults (1–3). In South Africa, life expectancy at age 15…
sa smith | March 18, 2013HIV-- Its a terrible game of chance.
Odds of HIV transmission are, superficially, rather low (its no measles). And, we can make the risk of transmission even lower various pro-active ways-- antiretroviral use to keep viral loads down in HIV+ people (especially in pregnant women about to give birth), screening donated blood and organs, condom use, needle exchanges, and so on.
But people still get infected.
Some progress relatively quickly to AIDS. Some dont progress at all, and never need to take antiretrovirals. Some have huge levels of HIV in their blood. In some, their physicians can barely…
sa smith | September 21, 2012Jerome Horwitz, the man who invented AZT, died-- Being in the basic virology realm of HIV Research World, I dont always pay as much attention to the clinical side of things as I should. Thus I didnt know about the really interesting history of Jerome Horowitz and AZT. Apparently he invented it as an anti-cancer agent, it didnt work, and they forgot about it... until someone tested it as a therapeutic agent for HIV, a moment that changed the course of the HIV epidemic. Sure it wasnt a perfect drug (drug resistance when used alone, terrible side-effect profile), but it gave everyone hope…
sa smith | June 14, 2010H/T to The Lay Scientist for getting my butt in gear to write this post.
Imagine you arent feeling well. You go to the doctor, they run some tests, and it turns out you have a tumor. Well... your physicians arent sure if you have a tumor or not, but they sent some of your blood to a lab, and a non-FDA approved test said you might have a tumor. Maybe. When your blood was sent to other labs, they couldnt find anything.
And even if you do have a tumor, you have no reason to believe that its actually causing a disease-- it very well could be benign. They dont know how its effecting you, if at…
sa smith | March 15, 2010[insert random collection of Ray Comfort jokes here]
Well, this is a welcome bit of good news!
A lectin isolated from bananas is a potent inhibitor of HIV replication.
Lectins are proteins that bind to specific sugars. For example, in humans, lets say you are infected with Staphylococus aureus. Your human lectins ignore 'your' sugar, but they recognize that the bacteria are making the 'wrong' sugar, and stick to them. This sets off a cascade of events that ends with the bacteria getting blown up.
Swanson et al have found a lectin in bananas ('BanLec', heh) that really likes high-mannose…
sa smith | February 15, 2010Last week I wrote about a disappointing study where they found that treating people infected with HIV-1 and HSV-2 with acyclovir didnt decrease their rates of HIV-1 transmission to their partners... even though they had lower HIV-1 viral loads, and fewer HSV-2 outbreaks.
Really disappointing.
Well, that same group reanalyzed their data from a different angle: The people who got acyclovir, how did that effect their progression to AIDS?
Daily aciclovir for HIV-1 disease progression in people dually infected with HIV-1 and herpes simplex virus type 2: a randomised placebo-controlled trial--
Our…
sa smith | February 11, 2010I refer to this so often-- I need to make a name for it.
A name for how Creationists are always parading about saying protein structures are so perfect and pretty colorful Lego blocks, and they all snap together perfectly, but reality is SO not like that? Reality is a buzzing, floppy, invisible mess?
Invisible is the key word here-- Scientists cant look into their microscopes and watch 'Inner Life of a Cell' in real-time.
Figuring out what protein structures 'look like' is really damn hard.
Example #1: VSV, Vesicular Stomatitis Virus? It is like, and old-school virus. Old-school. Like,…