HIV-1

Darwin vs. Design Why It Matters, And What We Can Do About It ⢠A TWO-DAY CONFERENCE ⢠Crossings Community Church Sanctuary & Atrium Friday, March 25 (7:00 - 9:00 pm) Saturday, March 26 (8:30 am - 12:30 pm) Hear LIVE from leading national experts from the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture: ⢠Michael J. Behe, Ph.D. - Author of Darwin's Black Box (named by National Review and World magazines as one of the 100 most important books of the 20th century) ⢠Casey Luskin, M.S. and J.D. - Co-author of Traipsing into Evolution ⢠Jay W. Richards, Ph.D. - Co-author of The…
I have no idea what the deal is, but for the past few days, my Google News Alert for 'HIV' has been full of stories of people not disclosing their HIV-1(+) status to their sexual partners. You cant do that. FORSYTH, Mo. -- A Branson man pleaded guilty to infecting his girlfriend with HIV, without telling her he has the virus. Now, Jeffrey Trumbo faces 10 years in prison. These cases are uncommon because the crime is rarely reported. Trumbo and the woman dated for six years. When she tried to break up with him, in April 2010, he told her he's positive. He told the Taney County Jail he's…
There is some percentage of the population who have a better prognosis if infected with HIV-1 than the rest of us. Remember those pirate flags and sombreros I talk about sometimes? Major histocompatibility complexes, type I. Some people put up HIV-1 flags that are easily recognizable as 'NOT SELF!!' to their cytotoxic T-cells, so they (sometimes) can control the virus better, thus are slower to progress to AIDS than people with different MHC I alleles. You notice the (sometimes) in parentheses up there. Having a 'protective' MHC I allele just means that you have ~50%:50% chance of not…
You still need to file this under "Whoa thats cool! But its not really a realistic solution for the AIDS pandemic". The HIV+ fellow they treated for cancer with bone marrow from a deltaCCR5 donor is still alive and kicking 3.5 years later, and for all intents and purposes, 'cured' of HIV/AIDS.Evidence for the cure of HIV infection by CCR5delat32/delta32 stem cell transplantation They went through and immunologically characterized 'The Berlin Patient' and hes pretty much normal now. HIV+ patients lose the CD4+ T-cells in their gut mucosa pretty much right after acute infection. This guy has…
Glance back at this post for a refresher on what Im going to write about here. Quick recap:HIV-1 usually evolves around this to 'hide' from CTLs. Maybe it puts a sombrero on the skull so the CTLs think its a party boat. But while HIV-1 evolves ways to hide from cytotoxic T-cells, this escape comes at a fitness cost. So if the sombrero-pirate-flag-HIV is transmitted to someone with a different MHC type whos CTLs couldnt see that pirate flag in the first place, HIV-1 is going to take off the sombrero and regain fitness. The Problem: HIV-1 is figuring out how to evade CTLs... while maintaining…
Knock knock. Whos there? Not XMRV in African blood donors or HIV/AIDS patients. Absence of detectable xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus in plasma or peripheral blood mononuclear cells of human immunodeficiency virus Type 1-infected blood donors or individuals in Africa. This is the third study not to find XMRV in HIV/AIDS patients. HIV/AIDS patients have every other pathogen under the sun at higher rates than healthy people. Except XMRV? Uh huh. Right. There is simply not enough evidence to believe XMRV is a real human pathogen, much less that it is the causative agent in a…
Huh. ERV, August 5, 2009--Maybe we just need to fr*me things differently-- Condoms arent 'birth control', theyre 'HIV/AIDS control, with unavoidable (but reversible) pregnancy reduction as a side-effect, like chemotherapy for cancer'. Teh Pope, November 20, 2010--While he will restate the Catholic Church's staunch objections to contraception because it believes it interferes with the creation of life, he will argue that using a condom to preserve life and avoid death can be a responsible act - even outside marriage. ..."In certain cases, where the intention is to reduce the risk of infection…
Awesome reader question time!Hi ERV, I've got a question about retroviruses that is probably simple, but none of my virology/micro lecturers have been able to answer it (they aren't HIV researchers) - why is integration of the retroviral genome necessary for productive infection? It's got the LTR promoter and all of the genes still, so after reverse transcription, why can't it just hang around outside the chromosome making virus babies, like the DNA viruses? Obviously it's not the case, or else integrase inhibitors and the like would do jack all, but I can't see why. Thats a good question!…
The internet is all abuzz on some stats just released by the CDC: Prevalence and Awareness of HIV Infection Among Men Who Have Sex With Men --- 21 Cities, United States, 2008 These are Google News stories on that report:1 in 5 gay, bisexual men in US cities has HIV The Checkup: CDC -- One in five sexually active gay urban men has HIV 44 pct of gay, bisexual men with HIV don't know it The authors of those articles didnt read the report. Or if they did, they didnt catch onto what I view as the most important findings of the report. Yes, there are still a lot of bisexual and homosexual men in…
In 2009, the results of an anti-HIV microbicide containing the drug PRO 2000 were released. It did jack shit. Rather than dumping a product that worked in the lab and in non-human primates, but not in humans, they tried again. At a higher dose-- Study 1 had the drug at 0.5%. So this study had a no-drug control, the 0.5% 'treatment' group (which they knew was not therapeutic), and a 2.0% treatment group. It didnt work at 2.0% either. Fantastic. I hope they do another trial next year at 8.0%. Surely that will work. [/bad mood ERV] (Anti-HIV microbicide that actually kinda works)
Lentiviruses, we think, are evolutionarily young. For example-- you have retroviruses in your DNA (ERVs) from other genuses (genii?) genera of retrovirus that are millions and millions of years old. So we know those other genuses (genii?) genera are millions and millions of years old. Lentiviruses, on the other hand, havent left us many of these kinds of fossils for us to figure out their age. We can still put out a good estimate, though. For instance-- SIV is all over the place in non-human primates in Africa. And while its ubiquitious in Africa (implying 'old'), its not found in non-…
Im going to have to add a 'C' to 'How kooks are made'-- The easy answers are rarely the right answers. Heres what I mean-- Lets say scientists do a high-throughput screening on a whole bunch of compounds and find a protein made in bananas inhibits HIV-1 infection. The 'easy' conclusions you make from this finding are not correct. You cannot eat bananas and be protected from HIV-1. You cannot eat bananas and get a therapeutic effect of this protein in already HIV+ individuals. You cannot apply bananas 'topically' and be protected from HIV-1. You cannot give people IV bananas as an anti-HIV…
What is it about ERVs that makes kooks cling desperately to them, like little 'gag-pol-env' life-rafts, as the kooks FAILboats sink into even further obscurity? I think the general populations ignorance about ERVs is what kooks find so attractive. Kooks, like Creationists, can say any damn thing they want about ERVs, and Average Joe/Jane doesnt know any better. Some Creationists might be ignorant themselves and actually believe such claims, but Ive corrected Creationists so many times at this point, its frankly hard to believe Creationist Claims about ERVs are anything but purposeful,…
A long time ago, I think on Pharyngula, Richard Dawkins said something that really pissed me off. Its been so long ago I cant find the right comment thread anymore, but Dawkins said something regarding epigenetics along the lines of "Um... isnt this just a fancy word for transcription regulation? Stuff weve been studying for years and years..." And I went all WARBLEGARBLE "OMG NO EPIGENETICS IS SO NEW AND DIFFERENT AND SO MUCH COOLER THAN TRANSCRIPTIONAL REGULATION OMFG RICHARD DAWKINS UR SUCH A N00B!!!" Yeah... Yeah...... I totally get it now. Ive slowly been getting it since that…
FINALLY! A free paper that explains the basics of viral quasispecies!!! YAAAAAY!!!Quasispecies Theory and the Behavior of RNA Viruses ARG! I have been wanting a paper like this to come out for AGES! I dont back down from explaining complex topics to you guys, but 'quasispecies' is just so weird... I am going to reference this thing all the time now! Eeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!! Survival of the flattest! **HAPPY-DANCE**
Im sure you all remember the guy I wrote about a while back, who had HIV-1 and leukemia. While that is actually pretty common, what wasnt common was his treatment-- a bone marrow transplant from a match who happened to lack the CCR5 gene, thus lacked one of the co-receptors HIV-1 needs to infect cells. This was a death-blow to the HIV-1 in this guys system. The virus in him simply has no (or very few) place else to go, so it burned out. But this is simply a non-viable idea for 'curing HIV/AIDS' for basically everyone else on the planet. Financial barriers, technological barriers,…
Sometimes I am the worlds worst advocate for my own research. Yes, its fantastically cool. Yes, we learn more about the world and how life evolves on it. But THE REASON I do HIV-1 research is to help ultimately create an HIV-1 vaccine. The only way we are going to beat HIV-1 is to stop new infections, and to stop new infections, we need a vaccine... Or, everyone could just wear condoms, which reduce HIV-1 transmission ~85%, and we could cut this bastard off at its head in a few generations and I can go do something else. *blink* Well, the thing is, things arent that simple. Half the people…
A few weeks ago, Slate ran this pointed article about the FDAs refusal to allow homosexual men to donate blood. Quick summary: Yes, homosexual men are 'at risk' for HIV-1 infection. But the majority of HIV-1+ homosexual men are aware of their status, thanks to increased HIV-1 awareness in their social community. African Americans also have an increased risk of being HIV-1+... but very few know they are positive. So if you are going to ban homosexuals for 'being at an increased risk of being HIV positive' (but not people who have sex with prostitutes or IV drug users), why not blacks too…
Antibody Discovered for 91% of HIV Strains *sigh* For all intents and purposes, Ive talked about this before. Not *this* antibody, but other SUPER AWESOME ANTIBODIES OMFG BREAKTHROUGH! Your adaptive immune system operates by, what I would call, picoevolution. It is chance + random mutations + natural selection. Lets say both you and I get infected with the exact same variant of swine flu. We both fight it off successfully, and generate a potent neutralizing antibody response to swine flu. My neutralizing antibodies are nothing like your neutralizing antibodies. Chance, randomization, and…
Read on my GoogleNews today:Taliban Reportedly Adding HIV-Infected Needles to Explosive Devices Hypodermic syringes are reportedly hidden below the surface of explosive devices, pointing upwards to prick bomb squad experts as they hunt for devices. The needles are feared to be contaminated with hepatitis and HIV. And if the bomb goes off, the needles become deadly flying shrapnel. Some viruses/bacteria can live a long time outside of the human body. Bacteria sporulate so that can survive in harsh conditions (think anthrax spores), and some viruses can survive outside of a host okay (polio,…