(Source: slavicinferno)
This vintage Kirk Cameron abstinence video from the 90s is fantastic
(Source: slavicinferno)
Emily Whitehead the girl whose cancer was ‘cured’ by HIV virus.
seven-year-old girl has become the first child leukaemia patient to be successfully treated by doctors using a disabled form of the virus that causes Aids to reprogramme the immune system.
When chemotherapy failed to work for Emily Whitehead, diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, she underwent a new experimental treatment at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
It involved tricking her immune system into fighting the cancer cells.
Dr Stephan Grupp, Director of the Centre for Childhood Cancer Research at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told CBS: “We’ve treated the first couple of patients and we’ve been blown away by the results”.
They’ve been very exciting.
“We collect cells of the immune system from a patient, so we use the patient’s own cells. We put in a new gene in those cells that makes the cells go after cancer cells and then we put those cells back in the patient.”
How to Survive a Plague - Official Trailer [HD]
This improbable group of activists bucked oppression and, with no scientific training, infiltrated government agencies and the pharmaceutical industry, helping to identify promising new medication and treatments and move them through trials and into drugstores in record time. In the process, they saved their own lives and ended the darkest days of a veritable plague, while virtually emptying AIDS wards in American hospitals in the process.
(Source: slavicinferno)
Engineered stem cells seek out, kill HIV in living organisms (End of HIV/AIDS?)
(Medical Xpress) — Expanding on previous research providing proof-of-principal that human stem cells can be genetically engineered into HIV-fighting cells, a team of UCLA researchers have now demonstrated that these cells can actually attack HIV-infected cells in a living organism.
The study, published April 12 in the journal PLoS Pathogens, demonstrates for the first time that engineering stem cells to form immune cells that target HIV is effective in suppressing the virus in living tissues in an animal model, said lead investigator Scott G. Kitchen, an assistant professor of medicine in the division of hematology andoncology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and a member of the UCLA AIDS Institute.
“We believe that this study lays the groundwork for the potential use of this type of an approach in combating HIV infection in infected individuals, in hopes of eradicating the virus from the body,” he said.
In the previous research, the scientists took CD8 cytotoxic T lymphocytes — the “killer” T cells that help fight infection — from an HIV-infected individual and identified the molecule known as the T cell receptor, which guides the T cell in recognizing and killing HIV-infected cells. However, these T cells, while able to destroy HIV-infected cells, do not exist in great enough quantities to clear the virus from the body. So the researchers cloned the receptor and used this to genetically engineer human blood stem cells. They then placed the engineered stem cells into human thymus tissue that had been implanted in mice, allowing them to study the reaction in a living organism.
The engineered stem cells developed into a large population of mature, multi-functional HIV-specific CD8 cells that could specifically target cells containing HIV proteins. The researchers also discovered that HIV-specific T cell receptors have to be matched to an individual in much the same way an organ is matched to a transplant patient.
In this current study, the researchers similarly engineered human blood stem cells and found that they can form mature T cells that can attack HIV in tissues where the virus resides and replicates. They did so by using a surrogate model, the humanized mouse, in which HIV infection closely resembles the disease and its progression in humans.
In a series of tests on the mice’s peripheral blood, plasma and organs conducted two weeks and six weeks after introducing the engineered cells, the researchers found that the number of CD4 “helper” T cells — which become depleted as a result of HIV infection — increased, while levels of HIV in the blood decreased. CD4 cells are white blood cells that are an important component of the immune system, helping to fight off infections. These results indicated that the engineered cells were capable of developing and migrating to the organs to fight infection there.
The researchers did note a potential weakness with the study: Human immune cellsreconstituted at a lower level in the humanized mice than they would in humans, and as a result, the mice’s immune systems were mostly, though not completely, reconstructed. Because of this, HIV may be slower to mutate in the mice than in human hosts. So the use of multiple, engineered T cell receptors may be one way to adjust for the higher potential for HIV mutation in humans.
“We believe that this is the first step in developing a more aggressive approach in correcting the defects in the human T cell responses that allow HIV to persist in infected people,” Kitchen said.
The researchers will now begin making T cell receptors that target different parts ofHIV and that could be used in more genetically matched individuals, he said.
More information: Research paper online: http://dx.plos.org … plpa.1002649
MTV Not Responsible For ‘Real World’ Cast Members Getting Raped And Contracting AIDS
When “The Real World” debuted twenty years ago, it was about seven reasonably intelligent strangers trying to make their way in New York City. Now the show is about people too stupid to recognize a terrible, exploitative contract. The Village Voice obtained the standard contract for cast members, and some of the stipulations are absolutely brazen in their subhuman treatment of cast members. Some choice examples:
• You may die, lose limbs, and suffer nervous breakdowns. (Stipulation 1)
• You grant the Producer blanket rights to your life story. (49)
• The Producer can do pretty much anything they want with your life story, including misrepresent it. (49)
• You may be humiliated and explicitly portrayed “in a false light.” (12)
• You can’t change your physical appearance during filming, without the Producer’s express permission. (26)
• The production crew can show up at your personal house at any time to film and/or to take anything they want, as long as they return the objects once production has ended. (20a)
• The Producer holds the authorship and copyright to every photograph, email, website, sound or video recording, documented performance created in relation to the program, on every medium imaginable. (8)
• You’re obligated to participate in a Reunion Special for up to five years after the show ends, you’ll be paid $2500 for your involvement, and the Producer only has to give you 14 days notice. (50c) [VV via the 20s]
And yet none of that is as bad as this combination:
• Producers are under no obligation to conduct background checks on your fellow cast members. (7)
• Interacting with other cast members carries the risk of “non-consensual physical contact” and should you contract AIDS, etc. during such an interaction, MTV is not responsible. (7)
That’s right: MTV has no obligation to do background checks on prospective cast members, but if you get raped and contract AIDS from another cast member, it’s your fault.
http://warmingglow.uproxx.com/2011/08/mtv-not-responsible-for-real-world-cast-members-getting-raped-and-contracting-aids
