Ok, here’s my crazy idea. I have a feeling it wouldn’t work if actually put into practice, but I’d like to hear why.
Ok. So we have an HIV positive person. Couldn’t you stop him from getting full blown AIDS by periodically draining out most of his HIV infected blood and replacing it with new clean blood? Ignore the practical difficulties of this and pretend I’m a billionaire that can bribe my way into getting nearly unlimited amounts of blood. Would I be able to go the rest of my life without developing AIDS?
Another idea is to pass your blood through a heater that heats the blood sufficiently to kill the virus. Both have been tried IIRC with I believe mixed results. I seem to recall that one of the attempts actually killed the patient.
The problem with your own method of course is that the new blood coming into the infected body could in turn become infected…you have to keep SOME blood in the body to keep the patient alive, right?
Well, maybe one of the medical types will help out…I don’t see how it would work. Intuitively I would have thought the heat thing would work but that doesn’t work either.
As others have mentioned, you need some blood in your body to stay alive. And in that blood, the HIV can hide, I’m assuming. When the new blood gets put in, the HIV just spreads and mutiplies once again.
HIV isn’t in just the blood. It can also infect cells of the brain, nervous system, lymphatic system, and digestive system. So virus from these other reservoirs will just re-infect the new blood.
HIV infects cells and adds its genetic material to your own cells. So I don’t think it’d matter as sometimes those cells don’t actually rewrite new viruses, they just stay dormant.
Umm, IIRC that is entirely the purpose of infecting cells and adding viral genetic material to them. Cells use genetic material as the recipes for building proteins. Viri co-opt this mechanism and trick cells into building new protein sheaths for them… and possibly also use the cell’s mechanism for backing up its genetic material to duplicate their own genes. In any event, this is the only method viri have of reproducing - using infected cells to create copies of themselves. Virally infected cells can rarely be described as ‘dormant’ – sometimes they’re sending new viral copies out into the bloodstream or through other channels to reach fresh uninfected cells, sometimes they’re just time bombs waiting and building up a huge viral population that doesn’t move on until the infected cell is dead, but…
Okay, I’ve started to ramble beyond my direct experience. Anyone else want to chime in here?
I believe the OP is already aware that the remaining infected blood and the virus reservoirs would reinfect the “clean” blood upon re-entry. He’s not asking if this can cure anyone, he’s asking if this method would halt the progression of the virus (IE: an HIV patient would remain infected but never develop full-blown AIDS).
I think you misunderstand what Wesley was getting at. HIV is different from many other viruses in that it is a retrovirus, with the genetic material consisting of RNA rather than DNA. A retrovirus does not merely co-opt the host’s cellular aparatus to make new copies, it makes DNA that becomes permanently integrated into the host cells genome. Because of this, it can be exceptionally difficult to eradicate.
Oh, thank you, Colibri. I think I read a column about that somewhere on some website devoted to drugs or something - the Straight Weed, or something? “Virus” has no attested Latin plural, and likely was simply never used in the plural, as it was a mass noun. The attested forms are somewhat confusing; it’s not even certain what noun declension it can be placed in.
However, it can be said with certainty that it was not a second declension masculine; those nouns are the ones that end in “-us, -i”. Even if virus could have been pluralized in Latin, it would not have been pluralized with “-i”. This is of course common in English words of Latin origin, but it makes little sense to generalize it to all English words ending in “-us” (witness the ugly results with “octopus” and the revolting vulgarism “octopi”) when English has a productive plural suffix as is - i.e. “-s/-es”.
The heat kills good things in the blood too, like red and whiter blood cells and platelets. Now, arguably, you can live with no white blood cells or platelets, just don’t get a cold or a cut until thery are replaced, but not enough red blood cells and nothing in your body gets oxygen and you die. And the temperature at which this starts to happen is suprisingly low, in the range of 104-107 degrees F. That’s why having a lower fever for a shorter period of time is ok, let your body do what it normalyl does to try and kill the invader, but if it gets too high or goes on too long, eventually your body starts to cook itself, and you need to get cooled down.
If the cancer is in the bone marrow, it wouldn’t do much good. Red blood cells don’t last all that long, so fairly soon, the bone marrow has to take over the job of making the blood.
Ok, so it sounds like that wouldn’t work. Now, with my very rudimentary knowledge of all things medical, HIV kills of white blood cells (or something like that, the parts of your blood cells that fight off infection) and cancer makes white blood cells go crazy? Could you give someone cancer to cure HIV? I am sure I am completely wrong here, but I vaguely remember seeing some Doctor show (ER? Chicago Hope?) years ago where this was hypothesized?
Of course, the red blood cells aren’t attacked by HIV so oxygenation is not really the problem. Your immune system is still blinded by the absence of unhijacked T-cells. What you need is a T-cell that is resistant to the virus. Unless I completely misunderstand the operation of the bug.
