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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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if only freddie was still around?
you make the AIDS thing sound like a nasty accident. if AIDS hadn't have got him something else would've
his promiscuous lifestyle would've resulted in hepatitus,
his smoking was headed him towards cancer
and as for the cocaine habit
our king of queen was a ticking bomb waiting to explode...
and the best part - he really couldn't give a fuck himself...that was the way he lived (and died)
i don't think he would carry on the same life as he did till the late 80's, i think he would be still performing and releasing great music and maybe some acting in movies, who knows...but well who can tell, it's Freddie.
basically every organ of his body that was susceptible to addiction/disease/injury had been subjected to about as much as a human body can take...and ffs - he REALLY enjoyed his lifestyle - so if he had not caught HIV WHY would he have stopped/slowed down?
of course he wouldn't
just look at the potential medical bill/risk of death - i honestly think he couldn't have survived
these kind of risks - something wouldve finished him off
cigarettes - lung cancer
promiscuity - aids/hepatitus, syphilis, herpes
alcohol - liver scirrosis?
cocaine and "other" substances - uppers - his nose must have been blasted, and his mind/nerves must've been heading for paranoia
one thing to add...before you contradict me...i have worked in prisons for 25 yrs
usually ONE of the above "temptations" is enough to finish off mere mortals, so even if we consider Freddie (God bless him) to be some kind of super-human deity - then the sheer number of "vices" he habitually partook of - would've finished him off
That's amazing considering the HIV has never been located - hence no one's "cured" it.
I'm sorry, but if someone had located the virus the news would be full of it.