I’ve just seen a BBC news feature about a american company announcing that they will have a vaccine for the western variant of AIDS in five years time. Aparently the vaccine will be very expensive to develop and will need continuing investment to remain effective. This means that a lot of very clever people will be devoting their working lives and a lot of expensive kit to this project.
A vaccine is not a cure. It protects you when you are exposed to the desease. The groups most exposed to AIDS in Western society who would benefit from the vaccine are promiscuous homosexuals and injecting junkies. IMHO niether group can claim to be ‘victims’. Someone smokes 50 cigarettes a day for forty years and dies of lung cancer is generally considered to have ‘asked for it’. A man who drinks a bottle of vodka and then drives his car is an ‘idiot’ if he kills himself and a murderer if he kills someone else. Why should this enormous effort be expended to protect those vulnerable to AIDS.
I know that there is a catastrophic AIDS epidemic in southern Africa but but the vaccine will not be any use against that strain.But millions of dollars will be spent protecting life-style choices in the western world.
If you don’t care about Africa, like me, there are probably much better things to spend this money on.
Because some unthinking man who has it is going to give it to his wife or girlfriend in the process of getting her pregnant, and she’s going to pass it to her child, and her child shouldn’t have to suffer from AIDS because its biological father is an asshole, that’s why.
Could be a great debate…
In the end, it is worth it. A vaccine wouldn’t save those already infected, but could eventually end that variety of AIDS completely. Many people are infected who are not “promiscuous homosexuals and injecting junkies..” Even if it only was those people who could potentially be saved by this, it would still be worthwhile, IMHO.
13 years ago, I participated in an AIDs vaccine study through NIH. At that time, they said it would be 5-10 years before they had a vaccine. 13 years later and they’re not even close. Why did I participate? I’m not gay. I don’t use drugs. I live a celibate life. I did it because I thought I could help countless people. Whether it worked or not, the effort is worth making.
I was fortunate that I could participate. It may’ve been the most important thing I could do with my life.
StG
Oh dear lord. You think that the majority of people in the western world who get AIDS “ask for it”? That it’s not worth developing a vaccine to protect those who do contract it? That contracting AIDS is part of/ a consequence of a life-style choice?
I’m sorry but I just don’t have the time or the patience to tell you how ignorant you are. The only thing I can tell you is that assuming that you are a male heterosexual non-junkie, it’s your peer group that is experiencing the bigger growth in infection than any other. Not the homosexuals and junkies who you seems to think “ask for it”.
I hope that someone with more patience than I can take the time to explain to you why developing a vaccine is worth it.
After just having heard the figure “as much as 40% of the population of Botswana may be living with HIV” all week, I cannot even begin to summon the mental clarity to give an answer as to why an HIV vaccine, no matter how expensive, would be a Good Thing.
You might not “care about Africa” but with percentages like that, it’s not something that’s going to stay confined to Africa for long.
I cannot wrap my brain around your reasoning… I don’t want to.
Actually, you are wrong.
67% of new infections were among gays (which are called ‘msm’ in the report) and IV drug users. It further breaks down as 42% of new cases being among gays and 33% among heterosexuals.
But that doesn’t really matter. In a moral sense, the only people who truely ‘accidently’ contracted HIV are those who get it from blood transfusions, rape victims, and children born to HIV+ mothers. Also, if someone’s SO, in a supposedly monogamous relationship, cheated on them, and spread HIV. But I doubt that is very common. For these people, I would like to see a AIDS cure (which is not the OP, I know).
Much of Africa is out of control, which is obvious when you look at the mind-boggling AIDS statistics in many countries there. Education is key to at least stemming the growth of AIDS over there, not medicine. Men raping virgins (in some cases, infants), to ‘purge themselves of AIDS’ show what an uphill fight it would be to educate the people there.
AIDS is incredibly preventable. It should be a non-issue by now, but fucking morons (statistically, we men are at fault far more) don’t take basic precautions. It is so simple to NOT get AIDS, that I have zero sympathy for those who engage in risky behavior and then bemoan their fate.
A vaccine would be nice, but shouldn’t be neccesary. It is a sad state of affairs that such a preventable disease is so widespread.
Pssst! HIV isn’t the only retrovirus in the universe. Founding out how to trounce this one will help us immensely on the next one, which may not adhere to your moral viewpoint.
Nitpick: it’s possible for both you and Francesca to be right. Even if most of the new cases are in gays, the heterosexual male population may be experiencing the highest increase in infections, which is what I think she was talking about.
But yeah, I disagree with the OP. To my mind, Tars has the best point: there are other, similar viruses with different infection vectors, and knowing how to fight this one will give us a head start on the next one.
No drug cure has ever been found for a viral infection, to the best of my knowledge. HIV comes closest as far as I can tell.
There are viruses that we have eliminated (or mostly eliminated) – polio and smallpox come to mind. How was this done? By vaccine.
A best case scenario would have a vaccine to treat the populations who have had contact with HIV+ individuals, like what was done for smallpox. Prevent spread of the virus, prevent the chain of infection. It is another piece of the puzzle in addressing this disease – education, prophylactics, drug treatments are all other key parts.
With HIV, though, there may be another level. HIV maintains its dormancy in macrophages for years after infection. We treat the disease basically by preventing it from emerging from dormancy. HIV drugs work by killing the virus in replication – inhibiting the protease or the polymerase which are working to build to viruses. We have no access to the virus in dormancy. A vaccine may give us access to this virus in dormancy, and thus offer something closer to a cure.
A vaccine is just one avenue of research. As Tars pointed out, any avenue of research may have benefits beyond the initial focus. Besides treatments for other retroviruses, this is a good area for studying evolution of viruses, emergence of resistance, epidemiology on huge scales, large scale drug manufacture while minimization of costs, modularization of the vaccine making process so epitopes can be swapped easily to make vaccines for different strains, and so on and so forth.
It is also not true that vaccines are only effective pre-exposure. This is usually the case, but it’s not universal. Rabies, considered by the CDC to be the most deadly disease known to man, is treatable by vaccine post exposure. Indeed, this is generally the rule, as only people with some heightened risk factor (zoo worker, vet) take the pre-exposure series.
Of course, once the symptoms of rabies start, the treatment goes along the lines of “bend over, put your head between your legs…”
Why is the West getting an AIDS vaccine before Africa who needs it so much more? $. Most of the money behind that research both from charities and pharmaceutical corps is from the West. Africa simply can’t afford the AIDS cure, but that’s a whole other thread.
But, is the vaccine worth it? I’m gonna take it. Aren’t you?
Its 3 AM Saturday night you’re drunk and horny, there’s a hot chick sitting on your lap and there’s no condom in sight. People aren’t morons, they’re weak and impulsive. Certainly it behooves people to be more cautions, but I think its apparent its not gonna’ happen.
Woo-hoo cainxinth
quote:
‘‘Its 3AM Saturday night your drunk and horny, there’s a hot chick sitting on your lap…’’
Oh crap, its Francesca
Brutus, this is purely anecdotal, but just to give you a quick refutation of your line of thinking, I am one individual who has known precisely one person known to me to be suffering from AIDS – and that person was a chaste wife who had slept with nobody but her husband, did not do drugs, or any of the other “evil things that AIDS sufferers do to bring the disease down upon them.” Unfortunately, her husband was not of the same fibre, and did contract the virus and give it to her. So I personally doubt that that situation is all that rare, even in America. (And both you and pluralgravity might do a little reading on what’s happening in Africa. It truly pains me to say that Jesse Helms is a much more charitable person than you two seem to be.)
“Deserve” is not a word I recognize, biologically speaking.
Silly me. I thought we’d grown out of the “virus as punishment for wicked acts” stage of thinking on the AIDS issue.
And God take the rest of them, eh? And why don’t we, as a society, get rid of drug and alcohol rehab as well. They’re just a bunch of weak souls who knew better, after all. We could probably save some money by not allowing treatment for work-related injuries as well…they knew the dangers when they signed up for the job.
The stigma associated with STDs is long overdue for a rethink. People make poor decisions all the time…those where sex is involved, while not a good thing, don’t deserve any more opprobrium than any other bad decision in any other aspect of life.
And of course, if this were a disease that was spread in an equally limited way that wasn’t sexual, and if it weren’t associated first in this country with us filthy hom’sexu’ls, the attitude throughout right-wing America would be quite different…
jayjay
I know you’re being ironic, but this is exactly the position held by AG John Ashcroft; he doesn’t believe in any public funding of rehab centers because it “rewards immorality”. Gee, thanks for the Christian love, John. What a collosal dick.
I haven’t heard much from this administration about AIDS, in any case.
A vaccine for the Western strain of AIDS would be great; a vaccine for African AIDS would be even better, because of the number of people involved. And even if you “don’t care about Africa”, there’s such a disaster brewing there that in would be in our most basic self interest to do whatever we can to help them, before there’s yet another group of desperate people who see nothing to lose in attacking the West any way they can.
I’m a human being, I care about my fellow human beings, and I’m nothing like you.
We all make bad choices; that is part of being human. Should our bad choices carry a death sentence? In the case of HIV, if you live in the developing world and don’t have access to the full range of Western health care, your bad choice in engaging in unprotected sex may very well result in not only your own death, but that of those close to you (spouse, children born to infected spouse, etc.)
But, as the OP doesn’t care about Africa, and seems to see the issue as one of pure self interest, how about this? The potential for political and military turmoil in Africa caused, or at least exacerbated, by the tremendous human misery of the AIDS epidemic will have repercussions for the entire world. Developing a vaccine can help prevent this, and even from a strict economic point of view will cost far less than picking up the pieces afterwards.
Hmm. I’m in the running for the SDMB’s selfish bastard award, and I think that knocking out AIDS, African or American, is a good investment. Read a history book: the people with high standards of living are less liable to shoot people.