Nation - Government AIDS success (great if true)

"I am not making idle speculation"

I would have thought that the President of South Africa had been well informed too as he also refused to listen to the advice from the World Health Org., and to acknowledge that HIV led to AIDS and so refused support for drugs for positive pregnant women which contributed to babies being born positive. Now that "the light" has been shown to him by those who are far more in the know than you Mr Objective (fitting name sic) then the number of babies now contracting HIV from the mother has dramatically been reduced.
This is my last comment to Objectives posts to which I consider a rather uninformed (and possible innocent) lack of information from the medical profession involved in HIV treatment and research (who greatly outnumber the medical and non-medical 'No's') I also get the feeling that he is actually implying that those of us who are educated and HIV + have been hoodwinked into taking a health threatening drug combination rather than a life saving one. The drop in recorded deaths for AIDs related illnesses in the western world since ARV's became available speak far more for the pro's than the 'flat earth' society.
Kun Jon I admire you for standing by your guy, and if you need any support or added information that may help your Thai boyfriend then you are welcome to send me a private message. Whatever I wish you both luck.

Objective.....
From reading your various posts you seem to be looking for simplistic black and white answers to a subject that is overwhelmingly complicated even to the medical community.

Viral loads are a direct measure of the activity and progression of the disease. The higher the viral the load the more compromised the immune system, the more likely you will suffer from the opportunistic diseases that ultimately make up the definition of AIDS. The current preferred and only effective way of keeping the disease from progressing is to keep the viral load down. This is largely achieved now with combination anti-viral drugs.

The only way currently to measure viral loads is using PCR techniques. PCR is not and was not designed to diagnose or measure any specific disease or medical condition. It is a technique that can measure either RNA or DNA, even when in minute quantities. It does this by amplifying either the RNA or DNA is a biological sample, which in turn makes it easier to identify and quantify. The theory and practice of PCR is far to complicated for me to go into here but it is the current "gold standard" for measuring at the molecular level and highly specific and sensitive. To suggest otherwise is completely wrong. You either have a poor understanding of the process or have interpreted what you have read about it incorrectly.

As for Anti-virals, you are correct in stating that they can cause side effects and one does not go on them lightly. However the anti-viral effects of the drugs and their ability to keep viral loads down, thus preventing progression of the disease, far out weigh the negative side effects. In fact, before the introduction of anti-virals HIV was pretty much a death sentence. Anti-virals, where given have reduced mortality significantly.

The fact that some people infected with HIV do not ever develop the disease has been proven to be because these individuals have a genetic mutation where they do not have the necessary receptor sights on their T cells, which prevents the T cells being infected by the virus, thus preventing an active infection. The incidence of this mutation is rather rare though.

The production of a vaccine has proven to be extremely difficult because, as you say, the virus mutates quickly. That is only part of the answer however. Another factor is that the virus attacks the immune system directly, the system which is designed to provide immunity against the virus in the first place. Also HIV is a retro virus, which makes vaccine production also highly complicated. Other successful vaccines have not been against retro viruses. Most experts think a workable vaccine is still 10 years away. However there has been some success with a vaccine against SIV (the monkey version of HIV) so perhaps progress will be faster.

There is nothing black and white with HIV, but the preponderance of practice and evidence clearly shows that the only effect way of keeping HIV from developing to AIDS is with anti-viral therapy. Until new and better drugs come along or until a vaccine is developed it is all there is. If you are HIV positive you need to find a doctor specializing in the treatment of HIV and together determine when is the best time for you to get on the cocktail.

Sanook wrote:

if you need any support or added information that may help your Thai boyfriend then you are welcome to send me a private message. Whatever I wish you both luck.

Thanks for that. I will be in a better situation to judge my boyfriend's condition in a little over a week. I spoke to him a few hours ago and he was not sounding as bright as he has recently so the quicker I can see him for myself the better. I'll certainly be in touch if I think you could provide any useful information.

Thanks again

Jon

[marc11864-old]

This appears to be a pretty well informed board regarding AIDS and HIV.

Does anyone know how much of this information is actually being disseminated to native Thais?

My Thai boyfriend was always aware of the safe sex advice to wear a condom but also had some very quaint and dangerous misconceptions.

The worst of these was that it was safe to have sex with a man without a condom if you loved each other.

It's difficult for a Westerner to fully understand the power of such beliefs among rural Thais. The power of love is a reality to him in a way that any number of blood count statistics just aren't.

I will never know how my boyfriend became HIV+ but he has a very low tolerance to alcohol and after a evening at the disco I've no doubt that he would have become very careless. When he first arrived in Bangkok he would have been very vunerable but he had had Safe Sex education in the school attached to the temple in his home village.

Sanook :“so [the african president] refused support for drugs for positive pregnant women which contributed to babies being born positive.”

You said you would not comment further, but for the benefit of others, here is an except from a powerful ARV product label:

https://www.gsk.ca/en/products/prescrip ... vir_pm.pdf

“A positive test for HIV-antibody in children under 15 months of age may represent passively acquired maternal antibodies, rather than an active antibody response to infection in the infant. Thus, the presence of HIV-antibody in a child less than 15 months of age must be interpreted with caution, especially in the asymptomatic infant. Auxiliary diagnostic tests may be required to confirm infection in such children.”

If according to the drug producers, a child can be identified HIV+, yet not have any actual viral infection, that does that say about HIV testing? Why are you all so confident with these tests? Blind faith? I fear for children and adults who are pumped full of powerful toxic drugs which weaken immune systems.

'Once in a long while', you claim that “Viral loads are a direct measure of the activity and progression of the disease.” Yet viral illnesses like the flu and immunizations like the flu shot can cause your viral load to increase up to six weeks after the illness or the immunization. What do you think the viral load measures exactly? It is not as precise as you have been led to believe. And you are incorrect to state that a PCR was created as a measuring technique. It was created by Kary Mullis, a nobel prize winner, as a gene replication technique. It is for creating massive number of copies of a gene. It is not meant as a measure of anything.

There are just too many questions about this subject, to rely on faith alone. Indeed there is nothing black or white about HIV, because there appear to be no concrete answers for common sense questions that require detail, as opposed to mere trust.