HIV/AIDS

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dbt1949
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HIV/AIDS

Post by dbt1949 »

Come the first of the year the new Medicare prescription drug program goes into effect. When it does it shuts off the tax breaks the drug companies got for giving away free drugs.Consequently drug companies aren't going to be so forecoming with aide to those who need expensive drugs.
Most,if not all these AIDS foundataions work because they get their drugs for free from the drug companies.When these compnaies stop helping people who are HIV+ or with AIDS what is going to happen to them?
I don't know but I'd be willing to bet most are not on any government programs such as Medicare or Medicaid.
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jblank
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Post by jblank »

A valid concern.

Why would the federal government stop tax breaks on this? Thats nuts.
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Post by ChrisGwinn »

jblank wrote:A valid concern.

Why would the federal government stop tax breaks on this? Thats nuts.
You're assuming the goal of the medicare drug program was to actually increase availability of drugs.
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Post by jblank »

ChrisGwinn wrote:
jblank wrote:A valid concern.

Why would the federal government stop tax breaks on this? Thats nuts.
You're assuming the goal of the medicare drug program was to actually increase availability of drugs.
:? Uh, no I'm not.

I'm simply commenting on why this is a strange time to cancel tax breaks for them.
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Post by geezer »

We should all be happy. They're doing away with one instance of "corporate welfare" after all . ;)
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Post by farley2k »

AIDS is so late 80s.
Never, under any circumstances, take a sleeping pill and a laxative the same night

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ChrisGwinn
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Post by ChrisGwinn »

jblank wrote:
ChrisGwinn wrote:
jblank wrote:A valid concern.

Why would the federal government stop tax breaks on this? Thats nuts.
You're assuming the goal of the medicare drug program was to actually increase availability of drugs.
:? Uh, no I'm not.

I'm simply commenting on why this is a strange time to cancel tax breaks for them.
Do you think the people currently running the republican party want drug companies to be giving out free AIDS drugs? If you assume that they don't, then using the cover of the medicare plan to kill the program makes perfect sense.
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Post by Defiant »

ChrisGwinn wrote: Do you think the people currently running the republican party want drug companies to be giving out free AIDS drugs? If you assume that they don't, then using the cover of the medicare plan to kill the program makes perfect sense.
OK, I'll bite. Why would republicans not want free AIDS drugs given out?
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Post by ChrisGwinn »

Nade wrote:
ChrisGwinn wrote: Do you think the people currently running the republican party want drug companies to be giving out free AIDS drugs? If you assume that they don't, then using the cover of the medicare plan to kill the program makes perfect sense.
OK, I'll bite. Why would republicans not want free AIDS drugs given out?
Part of it is just my general cynicism towards the whole medicare drug bill, which seemed to go to great lengths to not actually solve any problems.

Add that to the whole mess over how much the bill cost. I assume they were looking around for ways to keep the estimated cost of the bill down (besides bullying the estimators). Tax breaks cost money.

Then add the strange behavior surrounding any FDA ruling that remotely relates to sex or sexually-transmitted diseases (HPV vaccinations, plan B, etc., etc.) and the repeated Republican attempts to tie international AIDS funding to various ideological goals.

When you're talking about arm-twisting to push legislation through, it only takes one crazy congressman (and the co-operation of the party leaders) to add something to a bill. If the leaders have no particular commitment to free AIDS drugs, and an incentive to make the bill look cheaper, and a wingnut rep wants to cut off AIDS drug supplies, then why would you be surprised to have this happen? Especially in a bill where they can take cover behind improved access to prescription drugs.
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Post by Defiant »

ChrisGwinn wrote:I assume they were looking around for ways to keep the estimated cost of the bill down
Why would they start now? ;)
When you're talking about arm-twisting to push legislation through, it only takes one crazy congressman (and the co-operation of the party leaders) to add something to a bill. If the leaders have no particular commitment to free AIDS drugs, and an incentive to make the bill look cheaper, and a wingnut rep wants to cut off AIDS drug supplies, then why would you be surprised to have this happen?
OK, fair point.
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dbt1949
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Post by dbt1949 »

I think one reason is to get the extra taxes to help pay for the new drug program.I think also they want to force people on this new drug program.
For instance if you don't sign up for it by the first part of next year you will be penalized 1% a month in your premiums for every month you delay unless you already have adrug progam apporoved by them.

BTW.With the new plan you pay around $32 a month premiums.There's a deductable of like $250 or something. You copayment is around 20% on approved (many commonly prescribed drugs aren't apporoved of) prescriptions.You do this until your out of pocket expenses are around $2250.From there until around $5000 you pay 100% of the cost of your drugs.(all the while still making your premium payments).After that medicare will kick in again and pay all but around 5%. So each year the "patient" will be out around $5000. Many people on SS make less than $10,000 a year,givng them a few thousand dollars a year for housing,food,utilites,clothing etc.
You can find this information at both the Medicare site and the AARP site.
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Post by ChrisGwinn »

Nade wrote:
ChrisGwinn wrote:I assume they were looking around for ways to keep the estimated cost of the bill down
Why would they start now? ;)
The medicare bill had a fair amount of support that was predicated on a $400 billion cost. The actual costs are way higher than that, and they went through a lot of contortions (including some serious threatening of staffers) to make it look like it was going to cost less than that.
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Re: HIV/AIDS

Post by Isgrimnur »

WaPo
Even in a tiny town in the Mississippi Delta, Robert Rowland, an openly gay, single, middle-aged man, has no problem finding sex partners.

What he can’t find is PrEP, the once-a-day pill that protects users against HIV infection, or a doctor who knows much about it, or a drugstore that stocks it.

So every few months, he said, he drives three hours to Open Arms, the health center here that distributes an estimated 80 percent of these pills in the state. He refills his prescription, updates a nurse on his recent sexual history and gets a quick physical exam.
...
In 2017, the last year for which figures are available, the South had about 20,000 new HIV diagnoses — more than the rest of the United States combined. A big reason: In most of the Deep South, it is difficult for people at risk of contracting HIV to find the medication critical to protecting themselves from the virus that causes AIDS and ending the 38-year-old epidemic.

On Monday, President Trump unveiled a budget request that would deliver a first installment of cash for his plan to end the spread of HIV, focused in part on rural areas such as Mississippi, where a tangle of stigma, poverty, inadequate access to health care and lingering racial bias results in a disproportionately large share of HIV infections. But the proposal faces an uncertain fate in Congress — and comes as part of a budget request that, if enacted, would also make deep cuts to Medicaid, the country’s major health-care program for the poor, on which many people with HIV depend.
...
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Re: HIV/AIDS

Post by Isgrimnur »

CNBC
Using a combination of CRISPR gene editing technology and a therapeutic treatment called LASER ART, scientists at Temple University and the University of Nebraska Medical Center said they erased HIV DNA from the genomes of animals in what they call an unprecedented study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.
...
The virus is currently treated with antiretroviral therapy (ART), which suppresses it from replicating and prevents many patients in the U.S. from developing AIDS. ART does not rid the body of HIV, though, and if a patient stops treatment the virus will continue to replicate.

But now researchers say they’re able to destroy the virus in “humanized” mice, which were injected with human bone marrow to imitate the human immune system.
...
LASER ART is a “super” form of ART that keeps replication of the virus at low levels for longer time periods, according to co-author Dr. Howard Gendelman, chair of UNMC’s pharmacology and experimental neuroscience department and director of the the Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases. The antiretroviral drug is then stored in nanocrystals, which slowly release the drug where the virus is located.
LASER = Long-Acting Slow Effective Release.

AFAIK, no actual lasers are involved.
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Re: HIV/AIDS

Post by Isgrimnur »

SciAm
A research group at the medical devices and health care giant Abbott has discovered a new strain of human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV—the first to be identified in 19 years. Abbott continues to look for potential new HIV strains to ensure that diagnostic tests for blood screening and detecting infectious diseases remain up to date, says Mary Rodgers, senior author of the paper announcing the finding and head of the company’s Global Viral Surveillance Program.

The new strain, called HIV-1 group M subtype L, is extremely rare and can be detected by Abbott’s current screening system, Rodgers says. The company’s tests screen more than 60 percent of the global blood supply, she adds, noting it must detect every strain and “has to be right every time.”
...
The study, published today in the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes, serves as a reminder of the dangerous diversity of the HIV virus, says Jonah Sacha, a professor at the Vaccine and Gene Therapy Institute at Oregon Health & Science University , who was not involved in the new research.
...
But Michael Worobey, head of the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona, who was also not involved in the recent study, is more sanguine. Worobey says it is not a surprise that there are a diverse number of HIV strains in Central Africa, which is where the disease originated. Identifying a new one does not add much to the knowledge of HIV, he says.

“It’s actually misleading to describe genetic diversity from the [Democratic Republic of the] Congo as a new subtype,” Worobey says, “because the only useful meaning of the term ‘subtype’” would come from identification of a lineage of the virus that has spread significantly beyond Central Africa. Guidelines for classifying new strains of HIV were established in 2000. The recently discovered subtype belongs to the most common form of HIV, group M, which accounts for more than 90 percent of all HIV cases, Rodgers says.
...
The most recent of the three samples used to identify HIV-1 group M subtype L has been sitting in an Abbott freezer since 2001. The amount of virus in the sample was too low to read back then, but new technology recently made it possible. Comparing that sequence with the others made available by the research community, Abbott researchers found two additional examples of the strain—in samples from 1983 and 1990, also from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, hinting that it has been around for a while. “Now that we know it exists, it’ll change how we look for it,” Rodgers says.
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Re: HIV/AIDS

Post by Drazzil »

Isgrimnur wrote: Wed Nov 06, 2019 6:11 pm SciAm
A research group at the medical devices and health care giant Abbott has discovered a new strain of human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV—the first to be identified in 19 years. Abbott continues to look for potential new HIV strains to ensure that diagnostic tests for blood screening and detecting infectious diseases remain up to date, says Mary Rodgers, senior author of the paper announcing the finding and head of the company’s Global Viral Surveillance Program.

The new strain, called HIV-1 group M subtype L, is extremely rare and can be detected by Abbott’s current screening system, Rodgers says. The company’s tests screen more than 60 percent of the global blood supply, she adds, noting it must detect every strain and “has to be right every time.”
...
The study, published today in the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes, serves as a reminder of the dangerous diversity of the HIV virus, says Jonah Sacha, a professor at the Vaccine and Gene Therapy Institute at Oregon Health & Science University , who was not involved in the new research.
...
But Michael Worobey, head of the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona, who was also not involved in the recent study, is more sanguine. Worobey says it is not a surprise that there are a diverse number of HIV strains in Central Africa, which is where the disease originated. Identifying a new one does not add much to the knowledge of HIV, he says.

“It’s actually misleading to describe genetic diversity from the [Democratic Republic of the] Congo as a new subtype,” Worobey says, “because the only useful meaning of the term ‘subtype’” would come from identification of a lineage of the virus that has spread significantly beyond Central Africa. Guidelines for classifying new strains of HIV were established in 2000. The recently discovered subtype belongs to the most common form of HIV, group M, which accounts for more than 90 percent of all HIV cases, Rodgers says.
...
The most recent of the three samples used to identify HIV-1 group M subtype L has been sitting in an Abbott freezer since 2001. The amount of virus in the sample was too low to read back then, but new technology recently made it possible. Comparing that sequence with the others made available by the research community, Abbott researchers found two additional examples of the strain—in samples from 1983 and 1990, also from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, hinting that it has been around for a while. “Now that we know it exists, it’ll change how we look for it,” Rodgers says.
Wake me when it goes airborne.
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Re: HIV/AIDS

Post by Isgrimnur »

BBC
The first person cured of HIV - Timothy Ray Brown - has died from cancer.

Mr Brown, who was also known as "the Berlin patient", was given a bone marrow transplant from a donor who was naturally resistant to HIV in 2007.

It meant he no longer needed anti-viral drugs and he remained free of the virus, which can lead to Aids, for the rest of his life.
...
Mr Brown, 54, who was born in the US, was diagnosed with HIV while he lived in Berlin in 1995. Then in 2007 he developed a type of blood cancer called acute myeloid leukaemia.

His treatment involved destroying his bone marrow, which was producing the cancerous cells, and then having a bone marrow transplant.

The transfer came from a donor that had a rare mutation in part of their DNA called the CCR5 gene.
...
Mutations to CCR5 essentially lock the door and give people resistance to HIV.
...
But the leukaemia, that led to his HIV cure, returned earlier this year and spread to his brain and spinal cord.
...
The second person cured of HIV was announced earlier this year. Adam Castillejo - known as the London patient - had a similar treatment to Mr Brown and could come off his HIV drugs.
It's almost as if people are the problem.
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