Will we ever find a cure or vaccine for the HIV virus(es)?

Question

or do you think our immune system will evolve to combat it?

Answer 1

The cure is societal -- isolation of the people who suffer from it, so they can't infect the uninfected.

Answer 2

I hope one day we will but its still very far away.

Answer 3

A better question is do we think pharmaceutical companies would release it if they did.

The answer is probably no.

They make a killing (literally) off the lifetime prescriptions that are now necessary to prolong the life of AIDS patients.

Now, I'm not anti-Capitalism, but I hate the pharmaceutical industry which promotes itself as creating a better quality of life for people, but in reality over-medicate people, create fictitious diseases to meet a host of symptoms (which are often simply the side affects of other drugs or simply poor lifestyle choices), and exist simply to make BILLIONS of dollars at our expense.

If you think they are in the business of actually curing disease, you are sadly mistaken.  They exist to treat symptoms, often for the lifespan of the patient.  They are a big part of why our health-care system is so costly and screwed up.

Ask yourself why the industry hires roughly 100,000 lobbyists for ever 120,000 doctors in the US.  That's almost a 1 to 1 ratio of guys (and women) who simply buy doctors perks and trips and give out boatloads of samples and inundate their offices with literature, all designed to sway the ignorant public who think doctors are near god-like.

Drug companies spend $5 billion annually sending representatives to physician offices.

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Wise Duck - I think your naiveity is laughable.  Not that you likely will, but you should check my link to see the real truth about this industry you defend, or just google it and find your own sources if you don't like mine.

I am not anti-Western Medicine.  I am just against the motives that are common in the industry.  There is certainly a lot of benefit the industry has brought our society, but greed and profits should never exceed the Hippocratic Oath.  Unfortunately it has, and only by calling their practices into question, and not blindly accepting everything doctors tells us can we bring balance back to the industry.

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The following is from a blog I wrote on the subject of pharaceutical companies almost 2 years ago.  Not that it's specific to anything AIDS related, but if it causes 1 person to question the motives of the medical industry, it's served it's purpose.

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I mentioned creating "fictional diseases" above. That's a key strategy to expand pharmaceutical companies. Cause new diseases with existing drugs. While merely masking symptoms short term, most of the prescription drugs taken by millions of patients today cause a multitude of new diseases as a result of their known long-term side effects. For example, all cholesterol-lowering drugs currently on the market are known to increase the risk of developing cancer – but only after the patient has been taking the drug for several years. Then of course, you have to start taking a new drug to fend off the side effects of the old drug. If you have high cholesterol, maybe just cutting back or off red meat and dairy might be a good idea. Maybe exercise a little. I really, truly believe that there are very few things that can't be controlled with proper nutrition and exercise.

For those of you 25+, and especially those of you over 30, do you ever wonder why diseases like "irritable bowl syndrome", "restless leg syndrome" or "acid reflux disease" (to say nothing of ADD/ADHD or Epstein-Barr Syndrome) were never heard of when you were a kid, or when your parents were growing up? How in the world did our parents and their parents function with these problems without all the great drugs to keep them at bay?

Restless leg syndrome is marked by the urge to move the legs, especially at night. Severe cases can even interfere with sleep. In mild cases, exercise, stretching and (the horror! The horror!) cutting back on caffeine, can all help -- if any relief is needed at all. Nevertheless, in 2003 GlaxoSmithKline, maker of ropinirole, a drug for treating Parkinson's disease, began marketing ropinirole for the syndrome with a press release entitled "New survey reveals common yet under recognized disorder -- restless legs syndrome -- is keeping Americans awake at night."

Have Irritable Bowl Syndrome? Having high fiber foods and supplements, substituting soy or rice products for dairy, being careful with fresh fruits and vegetables that are high in insoluble fiber, and eating regular small amounts, can all help to lessen the symptoms of IBS. Foods and beverages to be avoided or minimized include red meat, oily or fatty and fried products, dairy (even when there is no lactose intolerance), solid chocolate, coffee (regular and decaffeinated), alcohol, carbonated beverages (especially those also containing sorbitol), and artificial sweeteners. Is it me, or is most of the above a staple in the typical American diet? Funny, but I'm guessing you don't hear a lot about IBS in Italy or France or Asia. Stress is also a key cause of IBS, and probably a great many other so-called diseases too.

Remember the Pinto? Ford's economy car of the 70's with the unfortunate tendency to explode after being rear-ended? Facing monster lawsuits, Ford eventually recalled and repaired "the bean's" gas tank.

Get ready for a druggy deja vu: On Sept. 30, 2005 drug maker Merck yanked its highly profitable anti-inflammatory drug Vioxx from the market. Eighteen months into a test for preventing cancer, those who got Vioxx had a doubled risk of heart attack and strokes.

That was not the first warning sign for the pain-killer, which reached the market in 1999 and was selling at a $2.5-billion annual clip. Merck was promoting Vioxx, its number-two seller, right up to the withdrawal. Hundreds of lawsuits have already begun; early estimates put their price at $12 billion, but that's really just a drop in the bucket in pharmaceutical profits.

In 2004, the top 10 pharmaceutical companies generated over 300 billion dollars in revenue.

The top 10 selling drugs (as of 2005) were: Lipitor, Plavix, Nexium, Advair, Zocor, Norvasc, Zyprexa, Risperdal, Prevacid, Effexor and just those 10 drugs generated over 57 billion dollars in revenue for the drug companies.

The bulk of these drugs treat the following diseases: high cholesterol, coronary artery disease, asthma, psychotic behavior, acid reflux disease, and depression.

The most common side effects of these drugs include: mild gastrointestinal symptoms or hemorrhage, cerebral hemorrhage, diarrhea, nausea, headache, increased blood pressure, suicide, change in heart rate, or an irregular heartbeat, palpitations, erratic behavior, blurred vision, fever, sweating, depression, hepatitis, "Brain shivers", jaundice, weight gain, low blood pressure, seizure, sexual dysfunction, insomnia, and/or dizziness.

Zocor alone, can cause the following: unexplained muscle pain, tenderness, or weakness accompanied by a fever or flulike symptoms, abdominal pain and unexplained fatigue.

Is it just me, or is that a lot of side effects for just 10 products. Granted not every symptom was true of every drug, but many overlap. And of course, if one of the drugs you take causes high blood pressure, there's another drug for that, if it gets too low, there's another for that, if you have sexual dysfunction, there's a drug for that (and not just for men anymore), etc. I won't comment on asthma or psychotic behavior, but the rest of those diseases can easily be impacted by simple changes in everyday daily behavior. Yes, I believe there are rare cares where diet, nutrition and exercise can't have a major impact, but I believe those cases are few and far between, probably 1 in 100 for every person who takes a drug, maybe less.

Do you ever laugh when you see a pharmaceutical commercial on TV, and they list (ever so discretely at the end) a long list of side-effects that our government thankfully forces them to disclose? I bet you have, but have you really thought about what was really so funny about it?

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John - I did answer the guy's question succinctly.  "Wise Duck" came along and mocked me, and I in turn addressed him.  I agree it's a long rant not specifically (but it is generally) related to the question, but I actually state that before it starts.  Clearly, at least in the duck's case, it's sorely needed.

Answer 4

I think if a cure is ever found, it will involve the receptor sites on the T-cells.  The HIV virus binds to these at very specific sites.  I don't think we'll kill the virus easily with antivirals, and it may just mutate, but a cure may someday come by finding a way to prevent the virus from attaching to the receptor site.  Therefore, it could not enter the cell, and would be engulfed by other white blood cells and die miserably.

     Maybe somehow engineering the nucleic acids in the virus to create one with some coating that won't adhere to the T-cell receptors, or something like that.  Just my theory.

Answer 5

there won't be a cure; viruses aren't treatable. obviously, we will not evolve an immunity to the virus. viruses evolve a hundred million times faster than humans. a vaccine is plausible.  

Answer 6

I do not believe an HIV vaccine is possible, because of the inherent changing of antigens that is facilitated by HIV's Reverse Transcriptase enzyme.  The most recent attempt was declared a failure long ago.

Wow! Such a long rant here! Irritable Bowel Syndrome? I thought we were answering this guy's question.

The Anti-HIV drugs were developed with the intent of curing HIV.  They work in a similar general mechanism of Anti-bacterial drugs, that is they interfere with HIV's enzymes and other "machinery" to stop it from reproducing.

With successful Antiviral therapy, an HIV-infected person can survive with minimal loss of CD4 T-cells and in some cases an undetectable viral load as well.  But the virus "hides out" in certain cells, and can infect again if the drugs are stopped.

Interesting that you mention evolution, some families in Africa are resistant (but not immune) to HIV infection due to a genetic mutation of their CD4 T-cells.

If the conspiracy theorists think that this is all junk and that "Big Pharma" is holding back an actual cure for HIV in favor of treatments that don't go all the way, i'd love to hear what this supposed hidden cure is.  I could easily win the Nobel Prize with this information.

Answer 7

I hope so.  The rapid evolution rate of HIV makes a vaccine difficult, and given its replication cycle, an outright cure is hard to imagine.

There is already a rare mutation that confers high resistance to a prevalent form of HIV.  Of course HIV would probably evolve around this if the allele was prevalent enough.

The view that evil pharmaceutical companies will withhold a secret is rather laughable.  A large amount of research is done by public laboratories which cannot hide their data.