HIV/AIDS
sa smith | April 18, 2011Remember this?
Never mind.
AIDS prevention pill study halted; no benefit seen
sa smith | April 12, 2011A couple weeks ago, Teh Discovery Institute held some kind of revival 'conference' at a local Evangelical church. The Usual Suspects were there-- Caseytits, West, some other guy, but also my HIV Evolution BFF Michael Behe. I ended up not being able to go due to a scheduling conflict. I was at a conference on HIV Evolution, which as we all know, according to the worlds most preeminent HIV researcher Michael Behe, doesnt exist.
So Ive been Googling around trying to get a recap of what went down.
Apparently, nothing.
As the kids say, "not a single fuck was given that day".
Not one blog post…
sa smith | March 3, 2011Scientific conferences are so cool :-D
It s bunch of really smart people getting together to pow-wow about a common interest, sharing their newest data, brainstorming new ideas, trouble-shooting, arguing, finding new collaborators-- its just so friggen cool :-D
Unfortunately, us smaller labs can only budget for one/a couple of these a year, so I am missing out on the 2011 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections :( Its also kind of a downer that Average Joes/Janes arent really allowed to come, not that most people could take a week off work to attend anyway.
Lucky for us…
sa smith | February 14, 2011While practicality is one of the tools in my arsenal against anti-science advocates, its not my favorite. Maybe its because I am a delicate female with doe-eyes and sweet sensitivities, but my favorite weapon is emotion.
I tell you what, its damn hard to talk to the general public (much less wooers) about the intricacies of genetics and retroviruses, its hard to explain the practicality of evolution in my research, but its real damn easy to give examples of that practicality that tugs on peoples heart-strings. Whether its your moms breast cancer, or your grandpas MS, I can give people a…
sa smith | February 10, 2011So I was just alerted by a reader that the Montreal Gazette just published a rebuttal to the HIV Denial POS they published a few days ago.
Dr. Norbert Gilmore takes an angle I like: Practicality.
We deal with it all the time with wooers-- its easy for HIV Deniers or Creationists or anti-vaxers to say something stupid, but its infinitely more time consuming for scientists to respond to the falsehoods.
An easy short-cut for us is practicality.
I use it when dealing with Creationists, specifically. "Fine. Lets grant the premise that everything scientists say about evolution is a lie. Why does…
sa smith | February 7, 2011HIV(+) status and sports is a big deal.
Any time there is a non-negligible risk of a bloody nose (golf or swimming vs soccer or basketball), there is a risk someone is going to get a blood droplet in the eye. Another player, a ref, a coach, a spectator, a beer vendor-- yes, the odds might be fantastic, but whatever the risks are, they arent worth it for entertainment.
Kudos to *most* state boxing commissions for recognizing that HIV status is a very, very big deal in their sport, thus require HIV tests before fights. And, if a boxer fails a test, they dont go all "DUDES GOT AIDS!", they…
sa smith | January 31, 2011There are lots of ways a scientific paper can make me laugh.
Sometimes I lol because the research is just so goddamn stupid.
Sometimes I lol in derision.
And rarely, I lol when someone does something conceptually simple, but incredibly clever, and it makes me happy. I read an abstract, laugh, read the rest of the paper, laugh, clap, and laugh. Clever people make me happy :)
This is a really clever paper:
Acquisition of HIV-1 Resistance in T Lymphocytes Using an ACA-Specific E. coli mRNA Interferase
A while back, I talked about a cell line I use in the lab called 'TZM-bl'. These cells…
sa smith | January 28, 2011An interesting paper on HIV-1 prevention came out while I was on my Grand Adventure:
Preexposure Chemoprophylaxis for HIV Prevention in Men Who Have Sex with Men
Quick summary: They used an antiretroviral, Truvada, as a prophylactic drug. That is, you take this antiretroviral every day in the hopes of preventing infection as opposed to taking the drug to control infection.
Basically, its The Pill... for HIV-1 infection instead of pregnancy.
And it actually kinda worked!
People who took the drug as instructed, had a 92% lower chance of becoming infected than placebo.
YAY!
... Yeah, no, read…
sa smith | January 20, 2011I 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…
sa smith | January 10, 2011There 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…
sa smith | December 15, 2010You 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…
sa smith | December 3, 2010Glance 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…
sa smith | November 22, 2010Knock 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…
sa smith | November 21, 2010Huh.
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…
sa smith | September 30, 2010Awesome 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!…
sa smith | September 24, 2010The 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…
sa smith | September 20, 2010In 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)
sa smith | September 17, 2010Lentiviruses, 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-…
sa smith | September 9, 2010Im 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…
sa smith | September 3, 2010What 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,…