Showing posts with label Aids. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Aids. Show all posts

Saturday, August 5, 2017

Novartis Using HIV Virus as Part of Gene Therapy

Novartis Using HIV Virus as Part of Gene Therapy | Gene-Therapy-dna | Big Pharma Medical & Health Science & Technology Sleuth Journal Special Interests Vaccines [image: www.aranca.com]The promise of gene therapy has been circulating for nearly a quarter of a century, and the best that can be said of it is that its results have been very modest, and sometimes tragic.


In 1999, American teenager Jesse Gelsinger died in a clinical trial where gene therapy was used.


One year later, a team of French researchers treated 11 children with a severe immunodeficiency, achieving partial success, but two of the patients developed leukemia because of the virus -a retrovirus- used for Introducing the correct gene into their cells. Despite the great efforts of scientists, little else has been improved; at least publicly


Despite little or no success, the United States will approve in September the first form of gene therapy for commercial use.



It will be used against leukemias that do not respond to any another treatment, and this time the technique, developed by Novartis, is backed by an apparent good result in an international clinical trial.


Now hold your breath. The vector virus, used as a carrier, is a manipulated version of HIV, the AIDS virus.


Like the viruses most commonly used so far, HIV is a retrovirus. Scientists have taken copies of its genome and integrated them into the human genome. It is a special type, scientists say. It is called a lentivirus. And, unlike traditional retroviruses, modified lentiviruses have been shown to be incapable of causing leukemia, as was the case with the children’s bubble.


Scientists claim that, unlike traditional retroviruses, modified lentiviruses have been shown to be incapable of causing leukemia, as was the case with the children’s bubble.


Now sit down for the following detail. The injection that is given to the patient costs between 250,000 and 500,000 euros.


The second key is that leukemia is a disease of the lymphocytes, or white blood cells, which are the incarnation of the immune system.


This avoids having to infect a solid organ, such as the liver or the lung, with the virus carrying the correct gene, which is extremely difficult. Instead, lymphocytes are removed from the patient and transported to Novartis laboratories, where virus infection is carried out with full assurance.


The cells are then selected and injected back into the patient. Scientists claim that two-thirds of them remain cancer-free two years after treatment. These would be a seriously relevant detail if they were true.


The main obstacle is now the economic one. The price of the injection is out of reach for most patients -250,000 to 500,000 euros- according to unofficial estimates.


Scientists say that if the patient heals, he does not need the medication again.


This is just the nightmare of any financial department at Big Pharma, and is often expressed with a cold statement: curing a disease is not profitable.


Unfortunately, it is going to be the big problem with the great advances of pharmacological research that are now waiting their turn in the industry’s production pipeline.


They are increasingly effective medicines, but also more expensive. A prologue of this type of situations has taken place with drugs against hepatitis C, which some administrations have resisted tooth and nail to fund despite its proven effectiveness against this serious disease.


This economic aspect is going to be our daily bread, and public health managers should already be preparing for what is coming. These are the lights and shadows of the future.

Novartis Using HIV Virus as Part of Gene Therapy

Novartis Using HIV Virus as Part of Gene Therapy | Gene-Therapy-dna | Big Pharma Medical & Health Science & Technology Sleuth Journal Special Interests Vaccines [image: www.aranca.com]The promise of gene therapy has been circulating for nearly a quarter of a century, and the best that can be said of it is that its results have been very modest, and sometimes tragic.


In 1999, American teenager Jesse Gelsinger died in a clinical trial where gene therapy was used.


One year later, a team of French researchers treated 11 children with a severe immunodeficiency, achieving partial success, but two of the patients developed leukemia because of the virus -a retrovirus- used for Introducing the correct gene into their cells. Despite the great efforts of scientists, little else has been improved; at least publicly


Despite little or no success, the United States will approve in September the first form of gene therapy for commercial use.



It will be used against leukemias that do not respond to any another treatment, and this time the technique, developed by Novartis, is backed by an apparent good result in an international clinical trial.


Now hold your breath. The vector virus, used as a carrier, is a manipulated version of HIV, the AIDS virus.


Like the viruses most commonly used so far, HIV is a retrovirus. Scientists have taken copies of its genome and integrated them into the human genome. It is a special type, scientists say. It is called a lentivirus. And, unlike traditional retroviruses, modified lentiviruses have been shown to be incapable of causing leukemia, as was the case with the children’s bubble.


Scientists claim that, unlike traditional retroviruses, modified lentiviruses have been shown to be incapable of causing leukemia, as was the case with the children’s bubble.


Now sit down for the following detail. The injection that is given to the patient costs between 250,000 and 500,000 euros.


The second key is that leukemia is a disease of the lymphocytes, or white blood cells, which are the incarnation of the immune system.


This avoids having to infect a solid organ, such as the liver or the lung, with the virus carrying the correct gene, which is extremely difficult. Instead, lymphocytes are removed from the patient and transported to Novartis laboratories, where virus infection is carried out with full assurance.


The cells are then selected and injected back into the patient. Scientists claim that two-thirds of them remain cancer-free two years after treatment. These would be a seriously relevant detail if they were true.


The main obstacle is now the economic one. The price of the injection is out of reach for most patients -250,000 to 500,000 euros- according to unofficial estimates.


Scientists say that if the patient heals, he does not need the medication again.


This is just the nightmare of any financial department at Big Pharma, and is often expressed with a cold statement: curing a disease is not profitable.


Unfortunately, it is going to be the big problem with the great advances of pharmacological research that are now waiting their turn in the industry’s production pipeline.


They are increasingly effective medicines, but also more expensive. A prologue of this type of situations has taken place with drugs against hepatitis C, which some administrations have resisted tooth and nail to fund despite its proven effectiveness against this serious disease.


This economic aspect is going to be our daily bread, and public health managers should already be preparing for what is coming. These are the lights and shadows of the future.

Thursday, July 13, 2017

Groundbreaking Study Shows Cannabis Can Help Stop HIV From Becoming AIDS

aids


With so many studies coming out on the numerous ways medical cannabis can treat health ailments, some of us may have become slightly numb to the wonders being revealed about this beneficial plant. But a new study published in the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes (JAIDS) might change that.


Researchers have found that THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), the main psychoactive ingredient in cannabis, can help prevent HIV from becoming AIDS. According to the abstract, published online by the National Institutes of Health:



“Plasmacytoid dendritic cells (pDCs) play a crucial role in host antiviral immune response through secretion of type I interferon. Interferon alpha (IFNα), a type I IFN, is critical for mounting the initial response to viral pathogens. A consequence of Human Immunodeficiency Virus-1 (HIV) infection is a decrease in both pDC number and function, but prolonged pDC activity has been linked with progression from HIV infection to the development of AIDS. Patients with HIV in the United States routinely use cannabinoid-based therapies to combat the side effects of HIV infection and antiretroviral therapy. However, cannabinoids, including Δ-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), are well-characterized immunosuppressants. Here, we report that THC suppressed secretion of IFNα by pDC from both healthy and HIV+ donors through a mechanism involving impaired phosphorylation of interferon regulatory factor 7. These results suggest that THC can suppress pDC function during the early host antiviral response by dampening pDC activation.”



Much of that is Greek to those of us not in the medical field, but the results suggest something stunning. HIV patients taking cannabis have likely helped prevent their condition from turning into full-blown AIDS. This will open the door for medical cannabis to be used for the dual purpose of treating side effects and preventing disease progression.


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READ MORE:  California Attorney General: Legalizing Marijuana is "Inevitable"



According to HIV.gov, “More than 1.1 million people in the U.S. are living with HIV today, and 1 in 7 of them don’t know it.” Although many thousands become newly infected every year, the rate declined 18 percent from 2008 to 2014.


Since the 1980s, over 1.2 million people have been diagnosed with AIDS, with 18,303 diagnosed with AIDS in 2015. 6,721 deaths were directly attributed to HIV in 2014.



Although HIV and AIDS cases are declining, they remain a significant problem. Now we find that the cannabis plant may have yet another miraculous benefit in the form of suppressing a deadly disease.



The AIDS epidemic began in the 1980s as Ronald Reagan ramped up the drug war. Doubling down on the failure and injustice of prohibition, Reagan and this fellow drug warriors stifled research into medical cannabis and denied the people the healing powers of this ancient medicinal plant.


While much progress has been made since those dark days—and the overwhelming majority of Americans now believe medical cannabis should be legal—a fervent prohibitionist now sits as the nation’s top law enforcement official.


Attorney General Jess Sessions has vowed to ramp up the drug war once again, relying on myths and falsehoods to justify his warped view of reality. Sessions is now trying to reinvigorate the DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) program put in place by Nancy Reagan in the 80s.


Thankfully, most states in the U.S. now recognize the power of medical cannabis and aren’t paying much attention to the ramblings of Reefer Madness politicians like Jeff Sessions. Medical research into cannabis is continuing to grow exponentially, adding to the body of factual knowledge and leaving prohibitionists nowhere to hide.

Wednesday, March 22, 2017

California Lawmakers Want to Reduce the Punishment for Not Revealing HIV Status To Sex Partners


hiv


This week, Democratic lawmakers in California proposed a piece of legislation that flies in the face of common sense and morality. In other words, it was a typical week for legislators in the Golden State.


State Senator Scott Wiener proposed a bill that would reduce the punishment for people who knowingly spread HIV, from a felony to a misdemeanor. Currently, the law states that if someone who knows that they have HIV tries to have unprotected sex and doesn’t notify their partner of their condition, then they can be charged with a felony and face up to 7 years in prison. If the bill passes, they’ll get a slap on the wrist instead.



The same downgrade in crime level would apply to people who donate blood or semen without telling the blood or semen bank that they have acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, or AIDS, or have tested positive for human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, the precursor to AIDS.


“HIV-related stigma is one of our main obstacles to reducing and ultimately eliminating infections,” Wiener said. “When you criminalize HIV or stigmatize people who have HIV it encourages people not to get tested, to stay in the shadows, not to be open about their status, not to seek treatment.”



Of course this argument doesn’t make any sense. HIV hasn’t been criminalized. Only trying to have sex without disclosing one’s HIV status is a crime, and for good reason. It’s an incurable disease that can kill without lifelong treatment. How could knowingly spreading that around not be considered a serious crime? And how would the fact that this is a crime make certain people nervous about getting tested? Is it because they don’t want the legal and moral responsibility that this knowledge would carry? That doesn’t really hold water either, because even if someone doesn’t want the legal responsibility that comes with knowing that they have HIV, they’re still going to want to know so that they can get life-saving medical treatment.


The lawmakers who back this bill point out that HIV is no longer a death sentence because of modern medical treatments, so it should no longer be a felony for someone who’s HIV positive to not alert their sex partners. However, HIV is still quite dangerous. Thousands of people in America still die from it every year.


They also argue that with proper treatment, HIV isn’t nearly as transmissible as it used to be. However, studies show that even with antiretroviral treatments, the risk is still there. Until there is a cure for this disease, it should absolutely remain illegal to have unprotected sex with someone without telling them if you’re HIV positive. Even if the risk of infection was minimal, failing to disclose your HIV status is wildly irresponsible.



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Author: Daniel Lang
Views: Read by 42 people
Date: March 22nd, 2017
Website: http://www.SHTFplan.com


Copyright Information: This content has been contributed to SHTFplan by a third-party or has been republished with permission from the author. Please contact the author directly for republishing information.


Thursday, March 9, 2017

Manufacturing consent in science: The diabolical twist

“Science plays a larger and larger role in running the world. But much of it is misleading science, slanted, cooked, biased, stepped on, false, and invented out of thin air.” (The Underground, Jon Rappoport)


In the famous 1988 Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman book, Manufacturing Consent, the authors explore how media distort the news and employ propaganda, in order to bring about consent in the population.


This is nothing less than the creation of reality.


From so many directions, official science is shaping our future—that’s why it’s vital to understand the manipulations involved.


It’s one thing to say media collaborate to sell a false picture of reality, a picture which is then bought by the masses. It’s quite another thing to say media collaborate to PRETEND there is ALREADY a consensus of the best professional minds on a given scientific subject—when there ISN’T.


I’ll start with a theoretical example. Let’s say three researchers at a university examine data based on US space shuttle missions, and they conclude that a small set of new conclusions is true. I’ll call this set X.


The researchers publish an article in a journal, and a healthy debate ensues in professional circles. Is X correct? Are there flaws in the research?


However, a powerful public agency decides that X is dangerous. X could lead to inquiries about contractors, investigations into cost overruns, missing money, and, worst of all, flawed engineering of the shuttles.


Therefore, this powerful agency goes on an all-out propaganda campaign, tapping its press sources, culminating in a new study that concludes X is entirely false.


The press basically trumpets: “Experts agree X is false. X was the result of shoddy research. The original researchers made numerous amateur mistakes.”


Notice that, in this case, the press isn’t simply distorting the news. It’s announcing that a superior consensus already/suddenly exists among the best scientific minds.


It’s lying about a consensus that doesn’t exist among scientists who, up until that moment, were having a healthy debate.


The press is presenting the false consensus as if it were real and widespread, when it isn’t.


But at this point, all relevant scientists get the message: keep quiet, don’t debate for another moment; otherwise grant monies will vanish, demotions will occur, peers will lay on heavy criticism, excommunication from The Club will follow.


So these scientists do keep quiet—and NOW a consensus among them comes into being, by implied threat and coercion.


This is basically what happened in the arena of energy-production via cold fusion. Wikipedia adequately summarizes the superficial situation: “The most famous cold fusion claims were made by Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann in 1989. After a brief period of interest by the wider scientific community, their reports were called into question by nuclear physicists.”


Not just called into question; defamed, derided, mocked, slammed over the head with a sledgehammer.


A superior consensus was invented, despite the fact that many scientists were intensely interested in the Pons/Fleishmann findings. Some of these scientists tried, in vain, to point out that failed efforts to reproduce those findings resulted because researchers were altering Pons and Fleishman’s methods.


No dice. Cold fusion was labeled a giant error and even a fraud. The official door was closed. THEN a consensus hardened—through coercion and intimidation.


In my research leading up to the publication of my first book, AIDS INC., in 1988, I reviewed the period of the early 1980s, when many researchers were coming at the question of the cause(s) of AIDS from different angles. But then, suddenly, in the spring of 1984, the US government officially announced, at a televised press conference, that a virus called HTLV-III (HIV) was the cause.


The science was shoddy, to put it mildly. It was bad science and no science. There was no single published paper that meticulously laid out proof of HIV as the cause of AIDS. But no matter. Overnight, all the monies that had gone into discovering what caused AIDS were diverted into the question: How does HIV cause AIDS? Any scientist who failed to see the handwriting on the wall was shoved out into the cold.


The press closed ranks. The consensus (though it was manufactured in the blink of an eye) was trumpeted around the world.


The big news headline wasn’t just false and distorted. It was false-and-distorted about a consensus that, until a few seconds ago, didn’t exist—and only existed now because researchers went silent and accepted dogma and folded up.


Predatory corporations, who spray poisonous pesticides all over the world and cause birth defects, need special protection and cover? Public health agencies that recommend giving vaccines to pregnant women, and increase the risk of babies born with defects? Solution: invent, overnight, and broadcast, a consensus that a basically harmless virus is the cause of those tragic birth defects.


I can assure you there are many scientists who don’t, for a second, believe the Zika virus is such an agent of destruction. But they have kept their mouths shut, and have chosen to roll with the tide.


However, that tide is turning, in many arenas of science. Journalists and researchers with no allegiance to official bodies have emerged.


A different species of handwriting is being inscribed on the wall.


What can the mainstream press do about it?


They can only deploy the crass tactics I’ve mentioned here.


A massive and stunning re-education is taking place among the population. No school is running it. No agency is sponsoring it. It’s happening from the ground up.


It turns out that living as a cipher and a unit in the sticky web of fabricated consensus isn’t nearly as attractive as it once was.


More and more, major media are using the consensus strategy to invent the news—and people are rejecting it.


Without realizing it, the press is committing professional suicide. An article that was once headlined, “Three dead horses found in a field,” has become, “Scientists agree that the three dead horses were an unconnected coincidence.” And people are laughing the press out of court.


The ongoing scandal surrounding the film, Vaxxed (trailer), is a good example. The press assures the population that pointing out a connection between a vaccine and autism is absurd, because scientific experts agree there is no such connection.


But the film features a long-time researcher at the Centers for Disease Control, who confesses that he and colleagues falsified a 2004 study in order to exonerate such a vaccine, the MMR, which does increase the risk of autism.


One of the film’s subjects is false consensus.


And the press can do no better than repeat, over and over: the consensus is real and valid.


The CDC researcher and whistleblower, William Thompson, essentially said: I was part of the fake consensus. Don’t you get it? I was a card-carrying member of the club that invents fake consensus. And now I’m telling you that.


Bottom line: the media are collapsing into their own swamp.


The swamp they manufacture.


For decades, the press, government agencies, the UN, and a whole host of think-tank, foundation, university players, and financiers have been fronting for a consensus which they falsely claim is already established: planned societies.


They frame this consensus as technology/science—as if science itself dictates that the future must consist of interlocked organizations which insert citizens into slots. Slots where they live, where they work, where they socialize.


Abstract patterns, imposed on humans.


This has the flavor of science, but on reflection, not the substance. “We can make the top-down organization of society look scientific, as if we’re following physical laws. We can sell this as science.”


Really? Is a chart detailing how thousands of slaves will transport huge blocks of stone to chosen sites, where monuments will be built, scientific? Of course not.


In the modern world, this fakery is called technocracy. Technocracy may employ methods such as technological surveillance, but the overriding plan for organizing society has nothing to do with science. It has to do with control.


And when you see it that way, the supposed consensus falls apart.


Who wants to live in an assigned slot “for the greater good?”


Up close and personal, who wants to give up his freedom?


Review your understanding of Marxism. “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” It, too, was sold as a scientific analysis of human society. It was imbued with the flavor of science, as if this Marxian principle had been discovered, just as molecules and atoms had been discovered.


And it too was promoted as an already-existing consensus among the wisest and the best and the brightest.


Via No More Fake News


Featured Image: Art Poskanzer/Flickr






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