Results tagged “hiv” from 60 Second Science

Of all the hair-brained policies we’ve had to endure as a nation over the past eight years, abstinence-only sex education has to be right near the top of the list. The idea that explaining the complexities of sexual reproduction and disease prevention will prove a greater aphrodisiac than exploding teenage hormones is logic at its most crocked. As a federally mandated ideological agenda item it’s shortsighted and asinine, and, as more than a few folks prognosticated, potentially harmful.

But really, how harmful did even the most cynical of us think it could be? Worst case is some kid misses the memo on condoms, goes happily philandering about, ends up like poor Telly from Kids and spends the rest of his life pissed at the world because no one bothered to give him a heads up. Don’t get me wrong, that’s bad, awful, tragic, but it betrays little more than a natural adolescent naivete about acts belonging to the province of adulthood. The real folly is that the no-sex-till-wedding-night set assumes that students somehow will glean the basics of the aforementioned complexities without the benefit of formal education.

Continue reading 'This just in: cure for AIDS found in Florida' >

In the past six months we’ve heard a couple grand and divergent pronouncements regarding two of the world’s deadliest diseases. David Baltimore recently waxed hopeless on the prospect of finding an HIV vaccine, in what amounts to a sober echo of Chris Rock’s resigned vision of the future:

"Yo, man, you weren't at work yesterday. What's up?''
''My AlDS is acting up."
''You know, when the weather get like this, my AlDS just pop up."
''But l took some Robitussin. l'm fine now!''

Conversely, opponents of malaria aren’t blinking as of yet. Indeed, they’re digging in for a fight. In October, in front of 300 of the globe’s leading malaria experts, Melinda Gates delivered a message of almost scandalous optimism: “The only way to end death malaria is to end malaria,” she boomed. The London Observer chronicles the response:

What she meant, and it provoked gasps from her audience, was 'end' as in 'eradicate' - known as the 'e' word in the malaria community because of its almost taboo status, so improbably, unscientifically dreamy does the task appear.

Continue reading 'Malaria researchers: dream on' >

Last time I checked, vaccines are supposed to prevent you from contracting the illness they're supposed to protect against — that's why I dutifully got my cootie shots every day at recess (never caught it either, depite the best efforts of icky girls). But Merck recently saw their HIV vaccine trials backfire in perhaps the worst way: Not only did they not work, they might make recipients more likely to contract HIV. Hoo boy...that had to be a rough briefing.

Continue reading 'HIV vaccine backfires in worst way possible: It might make you more susceptible to HIV' >

Despite the fact that there are millions of people around the world suffering from it, HIV is actually surprisingly hard to transmit. Each time a man has unprotected sex with an HIV-positive man, his risk of becoming infected is only 82 in 10,000, and the risk is even lower for heterosexual sex: a woman only has a 9 in 10,000 chance of contracting the virus from an HIV-positive male during an unprotected sexual encounter. Researchers have long wondered why this is, and whether our bodies have some kind of preliminary line of defense against the virus.

Continue reading 'Why is HIV so prevalent in Africa?' >

My personal theory was right all along -- lasers really are the answer to everything. Physicist Kong-Thon Tsen of Arizona State University and his son, Shaw-Wei Tsen, a pathology student at Johns Hopkins, singlehandedly redefined the idea of Take-Your-Son-to-Work Day by developing a superfast pulsing laser that can destroy viruses without harming healthy cells. In the future, this totally rad ultrashort-pulse (USP) laser could possibly be used to treat incurable viruses like HIV.

In the latest research, Tsen and his son demonstrated that their laser technique could shatter the protein shell, or capsid, of the tobacco mosaic virus, leaving behind only a harmless mucus-like mash of molecules.

The laser shattered the capsid at low energy: 40 times lower, in fact, than the energy level that harmed human T-cells. Other types of radiation, like ultraviolet light, kill microbes on produce, but would damage human cells.

Continue reading 'Superfast lasers could fix incurable viruses, everything else' >