It was the quick magic cure the public was demanding. With more testing it was shown to have significant side effects and is no longer used across the board.
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/the-rise-an...
'The AZT will work for you for a little while, for the maximum of one year, as it did for me, and afterwards the damage became visible.'
I wonder if the current quick magic cure demanded by the public may also overlook harmful side effects. The current pressure to dose those in low risk groups may be short-sighted. Ignoring risks is the subject of the thread.
It's important to remember that AZT (the first effective anti-retroviral treatment for HIV) was invented in the 60s as part of cancer research. It wasn't until the mid-80s that HIV researchers started testing it.
In other words, it's not as if the drug was invented in response to the AIDS crisis. Once the NIH/NCI made AIDS research a priority, it was a rather straightforward matter to start testing known anti-retroviral drugs. One can reasonably argue that if the government had made HIV research a priority in the late 70s and early 80s, the effective treatments would have been found before the epidemic exploded (for example, contrast to SARS or bird flu, where the index patients are chased down and isolated, and immunological research begins before there are even tens of thousands of patients.)
I'm sorry exactly what are you saying is wrong with AZT? It wasn't discontinued, it's still in use and was the first drug that really started to turn around HIV. I know all about this because my research into pharmaceutical chemistry during my phd contained a lot about nucleoside analogs (I worked with a similarly toxic one, gemcitabine), and because I was working near the forefront of HIV antiviral research at the time.
Bactrim addresses a symptom of AIDS (specifically, a side bacterial infecftion that many people infected with HIV are prone to getting) while AZT reduces viral infections. Two completely different things. The former is for people who are infected, the latter for people to not get infected. The fog of virus is like the fog of war: easy to criticize from the distance of time.
I think you've said enough. It's clear what your opinion about Fauci is, and it's adding absolutely nothing to this discussion.
You're right. The article implies no side effects other than the strict (even aggressive, if you will) treatment regiment, which does seem somewhat fishy.
HIV may not be a death sentence anymore, but it's still a serious disease with profound implications in one's lifestyle, and as far as I'm concerned, a cure can't come soon enough.
Maybe it's just me being jaded after at least 15 years (or at least it feels like it) of the HIV cure "coming soon" and the personal impact this has had on my community and multiple friends (LGBT).
This article being written kinda bothers me? By the authors own admission we know almost nothing. We really just know it's safe but don't even know if anyone stopped taking their ART.
Sure it's great that we are not getting a setback from it being unsafe... but I am just tired of hearing about the false starts that time and time again turn out ineffective.
Like I said maybe I am just jaded here but something about this rubs me the wrong way.
Mullis subscribed to the theory that AIDS is caused by infection with too many viruses at any given time. You go to the gay sauna, have sex with dozens of people, and the sheer multitude of infectious agents is what causes breakdown of the immune system. That doesn't square up with how we know the immune system works, not then, not now.
one of the alternative hypotheses was that the treatments then being given for HIV were actually killing people
You are not the first to wonder that! Back in the early 90s some scientists actually tried it on people with severe AIDS http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~piecze/Lancet.PDF - some seemingly improved, but the trial was too small and preliminary to be conclusive. When they published those results, there was a huge backlash about ethical concerns and the research got shut down.
I took a class taught by Dr. Pieczenik about 5 years ago and he still believed this idea would work if it was allowed to proceed.
> "This molecule has great potential to advance into translational and clinical studies."
> However, the drug has still not been tested in people who are HIV-positive.
To be sure that this new treatment is useful you must try it in a double blind experiment with many patients for many years.
Now, it's only an interesting idea with some in vitro support, but it's no a real cure. The title "HIV flushed out by cancer drug" is an optimistic exaggeration.
It is pretty bad, there's only a theoretical cream that may be in use some day, many years from now and it may reduce infection rates.
If you take the article at face value, we just cured HIV. And IMHO articles like that are VERY bad because over the years they have built a consensus of science is wrong and confusing and disappointing into the general public.
Anything that's repeatedly over hyped will end up like that.
Immunocompromised people die from opportunistic infections that don't normally cause illness at all. They would acquire immunocompromised status from HIV. Hence nobody would die "from AIDS", they would die from complications with the annual flu. They would be dead and still be HIV positive.
That's why you haven't seen your goal because you have an unfalsifiable viewpoint where there is no competing information to alter your view because it is an impossible standard. AZT has bad side effects and is antiquated technology. Okay. Yes, there was a lot of hysteria in the 1980s and pharma companies aren’t held accountable for their role in that. There is also competing information that can be reproduced easily regarding HIV to immunocompromised status and opportunistic infections killing people.
I would implore you to look at the things that are substantiated. In the 21st century, there are now drugs that keep your t-cell count high, such as PrEP. These aren't killing people and prevents progression to immunocompromised status, it also prevents spread of HIV.
I'm sorry you'll never get to your resolution about drugs from the 1980s, but there is nothing to build upon with that information and you’re extrapolating from a position thats been a dead end for a long time, in comparison to what we can build upon with successfully protecting t-cells.
This feels related to the movement at the beginning of the AIDS crisis that pushed for the release of new treatments. I can't remember exactly how it all shook out in the end; the alternative treatment (DDI) had better side effects for some people, but wasn't the final really effective treatment that was researched years later (protease inhibitors). That research was lobbied for by the same movements I believe.
From the article, they're extremely unwilling to call even that one successful patient "cured", as there are other variants of HIV that will latch on to different receptors.
Sounds like this isn't really big news at all - just one experimental cure that perhaps appears to have worked for one guy but will probably never be used in a widespread manner. Or am I too skeptical?
it took a long time for HAART to be developed though, and a lot of people died during the AZT-only era.
if I had the option of choosing an effective HIV vaccine (god if only!) and HAART, I'd definitely choose the vaccine. HAART is apparently really rough on people.. it ages you.
Magic Johnson was diagnosed with HIV in 1991, during the relative early days. 23 years later, he's apparently very healthy. The first AIDS cases in the US were in the mid 1970s give or take, with the first recognized at the time to be in 1980. So 11 years after recognizing that first case, they were able to take someone like Johnson and keep him alive indefinitely with a virus that was thought to be a death sentence in 1991.
And that's all prior to having cracked the human genome, prior to understanding stem cells, and so on. So progress was naturally slower in the 1980s or 1991 than it is now. The biotech industry was nowhere near as large in 1980 or 1990 as it is now (Genentech having been founded just in 1976).
Ebola doesn't stand a chance, even though the short term will be scary.
The amount of ‘HIV cures’ compared to drugs that actually hit the market are disproportionate. I don’t fully know what causes trials to fail but I would assume failure rate is pretty substantial, so I won’t hold my breath.
Thanks for sharing this. One of my major motivations when I was in high school- around the time that AIDS was starting to grow rapidly, was to go into drug discovery to find medicines that could cure HIV infection/reduce the impact of AIDS on patients.
At the time (about 5-6 years later) we were working on reverse transcriptase inhibitors, which I think eventually turned out to work pretty well as an early treatment. But boy, was the process slow... decades of basic and applied biology... to get where we are today.
It's so painful to watch COVID vax deniers today because it's hard enough to stay motivated over long periods of time... but when people just sort of crap all over the important scientific and medical work to get to where we are, it reminds me of some of the aggressive groups, such as Act Up SF (which actively fought against the establishment, including Fauci, who was a critical ally to HIV-infected patients at the time): https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/31/opinion/anthony-fauci-hiv...
There was a large gap between discovery of HIV in human populations, including people getting AIDS and dying of trivial infections due to their immune systems being wiped out. Once people started looking deeper it was also discovered that it was far from a "gay" disease. All of this happened before a single human tried AZT for an HIV infection.
Beyond all the scientific evidence we have real world Darwin Award trials: various HIV denialists infected with HIV have refused to take drugs to treat HIV and they have died. Others got very sick and were cured almost immediately after starting standard treatment.
We also have numerous clinical cases of people with undiagnosed HIV infections getting sick from common bacterial/fungal infections, get diagnosed as HIV positive, start the standard drug regimen, and their problems go away.
Not to mention SIV (the simian relative of HIV) causes an AIDS-like disease in some primate species which gives us both another line of direct evidence and almost certainly the original source of HIV.
You're just plain wrong.
We can squirt HIV in a dish and watch it kill the normally unkillable T cells. We know 100% what happens when your T cells collapse: your immune system stops working and some normally benign organism takes over your body then you die. We've sequenced HIV. We know how it mutates so rapidly. We know why it is able to attack T cells.
There is no mystery and no need for conspiracy. All lines of evidence point to HIV as the culprit.
I wonder if the current quick magic cure demanded by the public may also overlook harmful side effects. The current pressure to dose those in low risk groups may be short-sighted. Ignoring risks is the subject of the thread.
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