I read in NewScientist (hmmm) that there is a promising possibility for an AIDS vaccine; here’s what it involves:
Ordinary attenuated live vaccine methods don’t work for AIDS, because it quickly mutates back to a virulent form, so the proposal involves Genetically engineering a strain of HIV that will only be active in the presence of a certain chemical (they happened to choose an antibiotic as the trigger chemical).
So they infect you with the live modified virus, plus put you on a month’s course of the trigger chemical; the virus goes to work and your body starts building immunity to AIDS, then when you stop taking the trigger chemical, the virus becomes inactive and everything is back to normal, except that you now have AIDS antibodies, should these need ‘topping up’ at some point in the future, you simply take another course of the trigger chemical.
It has been tested in cultures of human cells and appears to work.
Ingenious, certainly.
Safe?
Admittedly, the article says that long term tests are required to ascertain the safety of the vaccine.
But my question is; would you trust it? even if they told you it’s safe - my own gut reaction is that I wouldn’t accept assurances of any kind - my fear would be that the engineered virus would mutate into a non-trigger-chemical-dependent form.
If I had AIDS, I’d say “bring it on.” I mean, what have I got to lose?
<Cue sad music> for all the people that are going to come in and say "but there are millions of people who live with AIDS by taking 36 different medications and living in a bubble! Why would you risk your life?
Life? You call that a life? Sorry, thanks but no thanks. Were I to get AIDS, I would want to live sure, but I would want to, you know, live.
Pardon my ignorance, but aren’t most vaccines like this? Where you take a little bit of a “harmless” form of the virus/whatever and get your body to be able to fight the mild version in the hopes it can take on the big guys?
(Please tell me if I’m wrong, my understanding of things medical is beyond remedial…)
If so, I really don’t see the difference. Its another vaccine. Put it in sugar cubes and hand it out to four year olds before they can go to kindergaten, kick kids out of school without it and go on your merry lives.
What’s the fear? If this is a similar idea to ‘normal’ vaccines, why is this any worse that the flu vaccine or polio or hepititus or any of the myriads of nasties there are vaccines for?
Ahh, yes. My bad. Well, lookey here. I forgot to take off my stupid hat today.
Now that I understand the OP question better, I think that there is no way in hell I’d take an AIDS vaccine. Shit, I don’t even get flu shots! I’m not at high risk of infection, so I think I just stick to monogomous sex and no heroin use and walk through the rest of life with my Illusion of Safety ™ brand blinders on until I die at the age of 65 from a heart attack like all the other men in my family.
Also, think about this: If you were vaccinated, could you “infect” someone else with your vaccine AIDS? If so, what would happen then? What if you had sex with some vaccinated person, and thereby became “vaccineated” yourself, and then your doctor puts you on the trigger drug for your genital herpes, and then you start to develop AIDS, and it all turns into a big cluster fuck? What then?
Does it make a difference that none of these are STD’s? Seriously, I’m just wondering, since you would in effect have AIDS it would just be dormant in the absence of a trigger drug.
Also, in case you haven’t noticed, you could just about sqeeze what I don’t know about pathology into the Grand frickin’ Canyon, so please forgive me if I ask some stupid questions.
Some vaccines are a live but weakened form of the virus that they are meant to inoculate against. Some are whole dead viruses, and others are chunks of viruses/bacteria that are enough to teach the immune system how to recognize the real guys when they come.
Nobody wants to give anyone a “weakened” form of HIV, since HIV mutates so quickly that it would almost immediately mutate into (many) virulent forms. Theoretically, the whole dead virus approach might work, but since it’s very easy not to totally kill all of the viruses in the making of the vaccine, it’s probable that a couple of live ones would slip in. People have been trying the last approach for the last 17 years or so, without much success. (For more info on current efforts to make an AIDS vaccine, see the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/05/health/05VACC.html)
I’d be skeptical of this idea, since people make antibodies to HIV. These antibodies don’t appear to do much, since the vast, vast majority of people (all of whom made antibodies to HIV) infected die.
[hijack]I think that this is my hundreth post![/hijack]
There was a time when I would have gladly volunteered for AIDS vaccine testing - I figured I’d be a hero to millions if the testing done on me led to a cure, and if it didn’t I would doubtlessly get the best medical treatment possible to keep me alive as long as possible. Back then I didn’t really have many reasons to want to continue living for very long anyway, but now I have a few.
Normal vaccines are based on a dead or crippled form of the real virus; as I said, this isn’t possible with HIV because it mutates so readily (this is one of the reasons why it kills people; it constantly changes at such a rate that your immune system can’t keep up with it)
My fear is that, given it’s prolific mutability, the trigger-dependant HIV virus in the vaccine would give rise to a non-dependent form which would certainly kill me.
That was my thinking, although the risk is never quite zero.
OK, even if you never have sex (or only ever have one partner in your whole life who also was a virgin) and don’t take drugs/share needles and all the other stuff, there’s still the risk that you might need a blood transfusion at some point (and despite the screening, there still is a trace of risk in this), or you might get attacked by one of those maniacs who likes to deliberately infect people.
Good point; in the trials, the trigger drug just happened to be an antibiotic substance (for noparticular reason) although I suspect if it worked, they would tailor a trigger chemical that had no other effects, and therefore would never be prescribed as anything other than the trigger drug.
Yes, but there is now no trace of the living pathogen for these diseases in your body, you just have the antibodies against them.
The HIV thing proposed here is different; it doesn’t disappear, it just goes dormant when the trigger chemical is removed, although I suppose if it was strictly dormant and non-reproductive, the viral bodies would eventually get flushed out or cleared up by your system anyway.
[hijack my own thread]
How on earth would you go about conducting proper trials for this sort of thing; it appears to work in the test tube, but to test it on humans exposes uninfected people to risks.
The article hinted that trials might take place in Africa, where the average uninfected person is very likely to get infected anyway, so what has he got to lose?
This certainly sounds interesting, and I might even be willing to try it if the proper testing etc. has been done with it. If they can give me a 95% safety guarantee or something I might be willing to ‘risk my life for science’ (no, I’m not that noble really, I just knew a few people with AIDS and that’s not fun).
I’m wondering though if this vaccine can be really that good. I mean, if the virus mutates so rapidly, it is quite possible that the antibodies I created with the help of the fake virus are in no way up to battle some mutated real virus I might ccontract three years later. Or am I missing something?
I’m not sure; I wondered about this as well; I though, it might be that by the time your body has managed to manufacture antibodies (which presumably are not form-specific), the virus has invaded the immune cells and inhibited the whole system.
Now if I had full blown AIDS - that might be a different story.
No need to introduce something like that by chance into a clean body. If AIDS were an airborn disease, or even a bloodborn pathogen that can survive for obscene amounts of time on certain surfaces, and can be contracted by hand to hand contact … like most things that have vaccines, then id possibly consider it.
But the fact that I’d have to do certain things intentionally, to put myself at a risk for AIDS (Aside from being accidentally stuck with a dirty needle) makes me say no.
Sorry - but thats too scary a thing to want to risk, unless you have nothing to lose.
I hate to be a rumor-spreader but this is just too freaky a tale not to share.
Two Holloweens ago, I was at “Monster Massive”, an annual rave held at the Sports Center. I went home early, about 3AM. Right after I left, my best friend witnessed his friend Ringo get jumped from behind by two guys, after they had wrestled him to the ground (which shouldn’t have been too difficult, Ringo’s a skinny guy) one of the two jabbed a needle into his shoulder through his shirt, pulled it out then ran out of the rave.
Ringo took blood tests that night at the hospital, and he came up clean, but because his friends couldn’t recover the actual needle, he had to wait TWO MONTHS for conclusive evidence that he hadn’t contracted anything serious. Can you imagine what he was thinking for those two months? That’s a hell of a holloween prank if you ask me.