Wow...
 

S.Africa to begin AIDS vaccine trials:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090720/ap_on_re_af/af_south_africa_aids_vaccine

Good news: We have a possible cure for AIDS
Bad news: There's no money to make it so you all gonna' die.

Very bittersweet.

Nobody in the pharmaceutical industry will step up on this - there's way more money to be made on treatments than in any cure. Unfortunate. And a reminder that this whole "economic slowdown" as the author calls it (really "economic collapse") is not a game. It's going to end up killing real people.

Isn't a vaccine preventative rather than curative? Nevertheless, this is good news. Not just for AIDS, but for many other diseases as well.

Cindy has MS...we've had spirits lifted, then hopes dashed by medical "news" before.

So, wait and see...wait and see.

Suppose you developed a vaccine for AIDS, and sold 600MM doses for $50 (in the OECD countries) and another 500MM doses for $10 (for those in the developing world who could afford $10).

Bummer for the other 5BN people in the world, but anyway you don't want to totally eradicate AIDS. You want a reason to continue selling vaccinations.

That is $35BN in revenue. Sounds pretty lucrative to me.

I guess an even better, alternative vaccine would be one that doesn't completely prevent people from getting AIDS, but mitigates the disease so that it is fully curable - with an expensive regimen of the other drugs that you sell. Now that would be a nice outcome, cackle cackle.

I hope it works, but I have a dumb question. How do they test the effectiveness? Do they expose the recipients to the infection to see if it "catches"?

This begs some questions: Did the recipients intentionally engage in risky behavior thinking they were not vulnerable?
Was it some sort of twisted Josef Mengele double-blind test where they gave the vaccine to half the group, gave a placebo to the rest, then exposed them all to see how many got infected?

I mean the disease is as close to 100% avoidable as you can get, simply by changing behavior. There is always a chance of something happening beyond your control, but generally speaking, if you don't share needles and keep a hat on your jimmy, you are not going to get HIV. If someone is aware of the disease enough to volunteer to test a vaccine, wouldn't they be educated enough to know how to NOT get it?

I am not trying to be a callous a-hole, honestly, how do they do a trial on this?

Tom

I expect that they give it to young girls. ...since most all the guys over there believe that doing a virgin will cure their problem.

two words - Bill Gates

>Nobody in the pharmaceutical industry will step up on this - there's way more money to be made on treatments than in any cure.

Another example is cancer. If someone really found a cure for cancer, think of the millions in donations that would suddenly go away; tens of thousands of professional charities and their minions suddenly thrown out of work.

Someone has probably already found the cure for cancer, but now they're sleeping with the fishes.

I don't know that cancer can be cured.

From what I gather, cancer is simply when a cell divides and there is a mistake. Most "mistakes" die off on their own, but cancer is when the mistake replicates. The chances of a self-replicating mistake increase with age, and the bodies ability to kill mistakes decreases with age.

It seems to me that cancer is what will kill you when nothing else does. Eventually the mistakes pile up and overwhelm your body's ability to cope with them.

(This post was intentionally general--I know there are many more issues with cancer and many more causes.)

Usually recruit a large study group, randomly give drug to some and placebo to others (control group), then follow them for an extended time to see if any statistically significant difference in rate/severity of disease or side effects between drug and placebo groups. Subjects don't know if they got drug or placebo (blind) and sometimes neither do the medical personnel who have contact w/ the subjects (double-blind).

Before doing a large scale blinded study like that, usually administer vaccine to a small group to test safety and see if vaccine is producing the desired antibodies etc. Unclear to me if the S African trials are a small-scale safety test or a full-scale efficacy test - kind of seems like the former.

Looks like none of the AIDS vaccine trials so far have been successful, one was halted because the drug group was actually suffering higher rates of AIDS than the placebo group.

Article discoussing why AIDS vaccine is so difficult
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29898087/

Article discussing a possibly promising approach
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090312114801.htm

Appears that well over $1BN/yr is being spent on AIDS vaccine research.

Not clear to me why S Africa government cut off funding for the S African vaccine trials. Weird politics around AIDS in that country - the govt spent a decade denying it was a disease and/or claiming it could be treated with lemon juice - supposedly they've seen the light, but maybe not so.

In 324 days, the entire WORLD will be glued to TVs watching South Africa. 26 BILLION non-unique viewers via TV and internet.

They have to put as many coats of white paint on as they can before then, and I'd bet this is one of them.

There is a vaccine for HIV/AIDS.
it's called responsibility and morality.

Yes, 1 out of ever hundred thousand might be accidental from an IV or something, but they are the exception.
Most people who get HIV get it from doing something they shouldn't or doing it with someone they shouldn't be with.

Hay, maybe if we just explained to them that if they do immoral stuff they might get sick and die, that would solve the problem. Surely if they realized it was dangerous they would stop doing it, right?