The vaccine is made from a patient's own dendritic cells and HIV isolated from the patient's own blood. Dendritic cells are crucial to the immune response. They grab foreign bodies in the blood and present them to other immune cells to trigger powerful immune system responses to destroy the foreign invaders.This is a great achievement! I hope it can be shown to work for the majority of AIDS sufferers...
HIV infection normally turns these important immune system responses off. But animal studies show that when dendritic cells are "loaded" with whole, killed AIDS viruses, they can trigger effective immune responses that keep infected animals from dying of AIDS.
Wednesday, December 1, 2004
New AIDS vaccine therapy promotes anti-HIV immunity
WebMD is reporting on a promising new therapy:
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I'm with you there. Two big factors: pharmaceutical companies and unchecked litigation against doctors.
The pharms have a ridiculous monopoly. The fact that we can get the same drugs for far less in Canada proves that the cost of medicine is artificial. There's something else that proves it, too...the sheer number of pharmaceutical representatives there are (working Augusta alone!) who have huge expense accounts to spend wooing doctor's offices with food and gifts. This obviously needs to be changed.
Meanwhile, doctors are unable to help everyone they feel they should, due to a fear of malpractice suits. They jack up their prices in order to have enough money to pay people off. Yes, we should be protected from bad doctors...but the way things are now, we're "protecting" ourselves from good doctors, too. (There's a really good website about how we can fight this sort of thing, but I'm at work and can't remember the url.)
My boss has an interesting idea about medical care...he thinks that everyone should have a medical savings account (I think that's what he called it) rather than "insurance". That way, each individual could decide what procedures to spend the money on, and they could save up for big procedures, etc. Employers would, instead of paying an insurance company, simply donate to this medical savings account. It's an interesting idea, but I don't know if it will catch on anytime soon...
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