AIDs in the crosshairs
12-20-2010, 09:54 PM
#11
Banned
Joined APC: Jun 2009
Posts: 93
Don't think anyone as a pilot has AIDs but there might be or they could know someone who has it.
I understand what you say here, since for sure there are many pilots with the sicknesses you mentioned, and in many ways the aviation doctors of a particular area which is the most infected one with HIV infection may actually not refuse a person like stop flying, while a person is doing fine in case of male pilots, under a law of a country. It depends from the area to area, but if a person takes for instance, very dangerous medicines for the other sicknesses should stop flying immediately in other words should stop joking with his life. Yes, I fly helicopters occasionally. So, its all depends from area to area. Yes, there are HIV positive pilots and guess where????This is reality of one area.Also, if someone is sick in case of male pilots they must inform their doctors and their friends. Just reality. Melu
I understand what you say here, since for sure there are many pilots with the sicknesses you mentioned, and in many ways the aviation doctors of a particular area which is the most infected one with HIV infection may actually not refuse a person like stop flying, while a person is doing fine in case of male pilots, under a law of a country. It depends from the area to area, but if a person takes for instance, very dangerous medicines for the other sicknesses should stop flying immediately in other words should stop joking with his life. Yes, I fly helicopters occasionally. So, its all depends from area to area. Yes, there are HIV positive pilots and guess where????This is reality of one area.Also, if someone is sick in case of male pilots they must inform their doctors and their friends. Just reality. Melu
12-21-2010, 01:03 PM
#13
Gets Weekends Off
Joined APC: Sep 2008
Position: The Far Side
Posts: 968
Originally Posted by zondaracer
If I put a bunch of stem cells next to a shakey's pizza, then will they turn into my own shakey's pizza?
06-06-2011, 01:39 PM
#14
pants on the ground
Thread Starter
Joined APC: Jan 2007
Position: back seat
Posts: 1,358
First man ‘functionally cured’ of HIV - Yahoo! News
Since HIV was discovered 30 years ago this week, 30 million people have died from the disease, and it continues to spread at the rate of 7,000 people per day globally, the UN says.
There's not much good news when it comes to this devastating virus. But that is perhaps why the story of the man scientists call the "Berlin patient" is so remarkable and has generated so much excitement among the HIV advocacy community.
Timothy Ray Brown suffered from both leukemia and HIV when he received a bone marrow stem cell transplant in Berlin, Germany in 2007. The transplant came from a man who was immune to HIV, which scientists say about 1 percent of Caucasians are. (According to San Francisco's CBS affiliate, the trait may be passed down from ancestors who became immune to the plague centuries ago. This Wired story says it was more likely passed down from people who became immune to a smallpox-like disease.)
What happened next has stunned the dozens of scientists who are closely monitoring Brown: His HIV went away.
"He has no replicating virus and he isn't taking any medication. And he will now probably never have any problems with HIV," his doctor Gero Huetter told Reuters. Brown now lives in the Bay Area, and suffers from some mild neurological difficulties after the operation. "It makes me very happy," he says of the incredible cure.
The development of anti-retroviral drugs in the 1990s was the first sign of hope in the epidemic, transforming the disease from a sudden killer to a more manageable illness that could be lived with for decades. But still, the miraculous cocktail of drugs is expensive, costing $13 billion a year in developing countries alone, according to Reuters. That figure is expected to triple in 20 years--raising the worry that more sick people will not be able to afford treatment.
Although Brown's story is remarkable, scientists were quick to point out that bone marrow transplants can be fatal, and there's no way Brown's treatment could be applied to the 33.3 million people around the world living with HIV. The discovery does encourage "cure research," according to Dr. Jay Levy, who co-discovered HIV thirty years ago, something that many people did not even think was possible years ago.
You can watch Brown talk about his cure in this CBS video report.
(Brown: Eric Risberg/AP)
This article has been updated to include more context about why some people are immune to HIV.
Since HIV was discovered 30 years ago this week, 30 million people have died from the disease, and it continues to spread at the rate of 7,000 people per day globally, the UN says.
There's not much good news when it comes to this devastating virus. But that is perhaps why the story of the man scientists call the "Berlin patient" is so remarkable and has generated so much excitement among the HIV advocacy community.
Timothy Ray Brown suffered from both leukemia and HIV when he received a bone marrow stem cell transplant in Berlin, Germany in 2007. The transplant came from a man who was immune to HIV, which scientists say about 1 percent of Caucasians are. (According to San Francisco's CBS affiliate, the trait may be passed down from ancestors who became immune to the plague centuries ago. This Wired story says it was more likely passed down from people who became immune to a smallpox-like disease.)
What happened next has stunned the dozens of scientists who are closely monitoring Brown: His HIV went away.
"He has no replicating virus and he isn't taking any medication. And he will now probably never have any problems with HIV," his doctor Gero Huetter told Reuters. Brown now lives in the Bay Area, and suffers from some mild neurological difficulties after the operation. "It makes me very happy," he says of the incredible cure.
The development of anti-retroviral drugs in the 1990s was the first sign of hope in the epidemic, transforming the disease from a sudden killer to a more manageable illness that could be lived with for decades. But still, the miraculous cocktail of drugs is expensive, costing $13 billion a year in developing countries alone, according to Reuters. That figure is expected to triple in 20 years--raising the worry that more sick people will not be able to afford treatment.
Although Brown's story is remarkable, scientists were quick to point out that bone marrow transplants can be fatal, and there's no way Brown's treatment could be applied to the 33.3 million people around the world living with HIV. The discovery does encourage "cure research," according to Dr. Jay Levy, who co-discovered HIV thirty years ago, something that many people did not even think was possible years ago.
You can watch Brown talk about his cure in this CBS video report.
(Brown: Eric Risberg/AP)
This article has been updated to include more context about why some people are immune to HIV.
06-06-2011, 05:46 PM
#15
Moderate Moderator
Joined APC: Mar 2008
Position: Curator at Static Display
Posts: 5,681
Magic Johnson & The Plague
Originally Posted by mmaviator
First man ‘functionally cured’ of HIV - Yahoo! News
The transplant came from a man who was immune to HIV, which scientists say about 1 percent of Caucasians are. (According to San Francisco's CBS affiliate, the trait may be passed down from ancestors who became immune to the plague centuries ago. This Wired story says it was more likely passed down from people who became immune to a smallpox-like disease.)
The transplant came from a man who was immune to HIV, which scientists say about 1 percent of Caucasians are. (According to San Francisco's CBS affiliate, the trait may be passed down from ancestors who became immune to the plague centuries ago. This Wired story says it was more likely passed down from people who became immune to a smallpox-like disease.)
Researchers reasoned that the survivors (and Magic) must have some kind of genetic anomaly. They did DNA tests, and sure enough, there was some extra gene in the helix that deals with the immune system.
Everyone in the village who had (survivor) ancestors there from the plague years had the mutation.
They think it may have something to do with smallpox, as well.
09-19-2011, 07:21 PM
#17
pants on the ground
Thread Starter
Joined APC: Jan 2007
Position: back seat
Posts: 1,358
No I don't have HIV/AIDs just posting information about Science breakthroughs.
Gene Therapy May Thwart HIV - ScienceNOW
This past year, a Berlin man, Timothy Brown, became world famous as the first—and thus far only—person to apparently have been cured of his HIV infection. Brown's HIV disappeared after he developed leukemia and doctors gave him repeated blood transfusions from a donor who harbored a mutated version of a receptor the virus uses to enter cells. Now, researchers report promising results from two small gene-therapy studies that mimic this strategy, hinting that the field may be moving closer to a cure that works for the masses.
At the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy in Chicago, Illinois, this weekend, researchers reported preliminary results from tests of a novel treatment in 15 HIV-infected people designed to free them from the need to take antiretroviral drugs. The studies, conducted separately on the East and West coasts of the United States, attempt to make the immune system resistant to HIV by crippling a receptor, known as CCR5, on T cells that the virus uses during the infection process. The man who donated blood for Timothy Brown's transfusions had naturally defective CCR5 receptors.
The trial participants had T cells removed from their blood and then modified in the laboratory with a designer enzyme engineered by Sangamo BioSciences in Richmond, California. The enzyme, called a zinc finger nuclease, clips the gene for the CCR5 receptor and disables it. Ten billion modified cells were then reinfused into the participants' bodies, and the new data show that about 25% of cells had the mutant CCR5s. The studies found that modified T cells persisted for more than 6 months in several patients.
In one provocative case reported in Chicago yesterday, a patient who received the gene therapy and then stopped taking antiretroviral drugs had HIV return within a month, as typically happens when people interrupt their treatment. But a few weeks later, the virus began to decline, and it dropped to undetectable levels in concert with evidence that the gene therapy had altered his T cells. "Those kinetics are very different from what I've seen in treatment interruption studies, and we've done many," says Pablo Tebas, an infectious disease clinician at the University of Pennsylvania who heads the East Coast study of six participants. "This patient goes down, way down."
Tebas recognizes that his study is uncontrolled and that they've seen this response in only one patient. What's more, the patient already had a natural advantage because he has a crippled CCR5 gene in one of the two copies he inherited. Tebas suspects that the gene therapy coupled with his natural CCR5 mutation combined to lead to the dramatic result. "This is a very small experiment, and I don't think it's a cure by any means, but the Berlin patient is only one patient, and it changed research priorities," Tebas says. "This shows that there's a correlation between antiviral activity and the proportion of modified cells. It shows a path forward."
Although researchers do not expect the gene therapy to entirely clear HIV from the body, they hope it will create a "functional cure"—in other words, contain the virus to such a powerful extent that people no longer need antiretrovirals.
Virologist David Margolis, who is conducting his own HIV cure studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, says many questions remain about the impact of this gene therapy, however. "These data are interesting, and encouraging, but still incomplete," he says. Yet Margolis is "impressed" by the percentage of cells that have the artificially modified CCR5 gene.
Even if this gene therapy proves itself, the cost and technical challenge of the intervention means it likely will have little chance of being used outside of wealthy countries. But Tebas notes that the cost of antiretrovirals also is high and that any calculation would have to balance one against the other.
Follow ScienceNOW on Facebook and Twitter
Gene Therapy May Thwart HIV - ScienceNOW
This past year, a Berlin man, Timothy Brown, became world famous as the first—and thus far only—person to apparently have been cured of his HIV infection. Brown's HIV disappeared after he developed leukemia and doctors gave him repeated blood transfusions from a donor who harbored a mutated version of a receptor the virus uses to enter cells. Now, researchers report promising results from two small gene-therapy studies that mimic this strategy, hinting that the field may be moving closer to a cure that works for the masses.
At the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy in Chicago, Illinois, this weekend, researchers reported preliminary results from tests of a novel treatment in 15 HIV-infected people designed to free them from the need to take antiretroviral drugs. The studies, conducted separately on the East and West coasts of the United States, attempt to make the immune system resistant to HIV by crippling a receptor, known as CCR5, on T cells that the virus uses during the infection process. The man who donated blood for Timothy Brown's transfusions had naturally defective CCR5 receptors.
The trial participants had T cells removed from their blood and then modified in the laboratory with a designer enzyme engineered by Sangamo BioSciences in Richmond, California. The enzyme, called a zinc finger nuclease, clips the gene for the CCR5 receptor and disables it. Ten billion modified cells were then reinfused into the participants' bodies, and the new data show that about 25% of cells had the mutant CCR5s. The studies found that modified T cells persisted for more than 6 months in several patients.
In one provocative case reported in Chicago yesterday, a patient who received the gene therapy and then stopped taking antiretroviral drugs had HIV return within a month, as typically happens when people interrupt their treatment. But a few weeks later, the virus began to decline, and it dropped to undetectable levels in concert with evidence that the gene therapy had altered his T cells. "Those kinetics are very different from what I've seen in treatment interruption studies, and we've done many," says Pablo Tebas, an infectious disease clinician at the University of Pennsylvania who heads the East Coast study of six participants. "This patient goes down, way down."
Tebas recognizes that his study is uncontrolled and that they've seen this response in only one patient. What's more, the patient already had a natural advantage because he has a crippled CCR5 gene in one of the two copies he inherited. Tebas suspects that the gene therapy coupled with his natural CCR5 mutation combined to lead to the dramatic result. "This is a very small experiment, and I don't think it's a cure by any means, but the Berlin patient is only one patient, and it changed research priorities," Tebas says. "This shows that there's a correlation between antiviral activity and the proportion of modified cells. It shows a path forward."
Although researchers do not expect the gene therapy to entirely clear HIV from the body, they hope it will create a "functional cure"—in other words, contain the virus to such a powerful extent that people no longer need antiretrovirals.
Virologist David Margolis, who is conducting his own HIV cure studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, says many questions remain about the impact of this gene therapy, however. "These data are interesting, and encouraging, but still incomplete," he says. Yet Margolis is "impressed" by the percentage of cells that have the artificially modified CCR5 gene.
Even if this gene therapy proves itself, the cost and technical challenge of the intervention means it likely will have little chance of being used outside of wealthy countries. But Tebas notes that the cost of antiretrovirals also is high and that any calculation would have to balance one against the other.
Follow ScienceNOW on Facebook and Twitter
09-20-2011, 04:19 AM
#18
Gets Weekends Off
Joined APC: Jan 2010
Posts: 327
Pilots with AIDS are being certified by the FAA, even with a First Class certificate. This according to Pilot Medical Solutions, Inc.
I don't know the validity of these statistics. I have seen this company slammed on these forums before. They're supposed to help you get your medical condition approved by the FAA. I visited their website and they claim as many as 8 people with AIDS and various classes of medicals are being certified by the FAA. The number is higher quite a bit higher for people with HIV.
So for what its worth, here's the link.... http://www.*************/sistats.htm
It's unclear to me if these pilots are just clients, or have actually had their medical certification approved.
I don't know the validity of these statistics. I have seen this company slammed on these forums before. They're supposed to help you get your medical condition approved by the FAA. I visited their website and they claim as many as 8 people with AIDS and various classes of medicals are being certified by the FAA. The number is higher quite a bit higher for people with HIV.
So for what its worth, here's the link.... http://www.*************/sistats.htm
It's unclear to me if these pilots are just clients, or have actually had their medical certification approved.
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