"The researchers analysed the blood of 170 children from South Africa who had HIV, had never had antiretroviral therapy and yet had not developed Aids.
Tests showed they had tens of thousands of human immunodeficiency viruses in every millilitre of their blood.
...
Prof Philip Goulder, one of the researchers from the University of Oxford, told the BBC: 'Essentially, their immune system is ignoring the virus as far as possible.'
'Waging war against the virus is in most cases the wrong thing to do.'"
Biology is very rarely binary. Chances are some will and some will not before they die. The interesting question is what percentage can make it to say 50 without problems.
It's possible similar crossovers to SID > AIDS may have happened many times in the past and due to slow travel and worse healthcare the outbreaks just died out. So, some percentage of the population might have relative immunity to similar diseases.
It's also possible for some new mutation to show up that deals with AIDS over time.
Or, they could be all dead before 30 without treatment it's hard to say.
This is a wise observation and I didn't really appreciate it until I was about 40. I came from the hybrid route (hacker who started learning biology early) and I think most people who come to bio from physics or CS have a lot of learning to do about how biology is "different" from those fields. The underlying systems tend to be complex- far more complex than people who work on distributed systems or HEP are comfortable working with. They are ambiguous, highly multidimensional, there are complex feedback mechanisms and redundancies, etc.
This seems like almost a worst case scenario, (obviously not for the kids, but for everyone they might get intimate with) since there can be carriers out there with a huge viral load who have absolutely no idea that they have it.
Evolution is a two way street, and viruses are way faster to mutate than human beings.
HIV is probably already evolving a bunch of different strains with variying degrees of mortality and morbidity. Those that tend to remain dormant for longer or otherwise fail to kill the host are more likely to spread faster.
If you consider that plus the fact that humans are already begining to develop defenses, you comment could be qualified as: 90% of people who don't have resistence face worse health outcomes, - up to but not necesarily an early demise, - and end up producing fewer offspring.
If keeping the immune system from activating helps, what's the effect of wiping out the immune system completely? e.g., radiation and bone marrow transplant
HIV hides in "sanctuary sites" or "viral reservoirs" around the body and can come back even if blood tests show no traces of it for months or years, like that miracle baby that was in the news a few years ago:
Initially after that child – the so-called Mississippi baby – was taken off the drugs, there was no virus detectable in her blood, and her doctor claimed a cure. Unfortunately, after four years the virus returned and she had to restart drug treatment.https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn27112-hivs-hiding-pla...
> However, our style is to use lower case with an initial cap for acronyms, where you would normally pronounce the set of letters as a word (eg Aids, Farc, Eta, Nafta, Nasa, Opec, Apec).
It is confusing because in English it is almost always spelt AIDS. Before clicking the link I was thinking for a while wondering what the heck the article was about. I assumed they had just mis-capitalised AIDS.
If you look in google news, only the British media uses Aids and Opec. The rest of the world uses capitalised. I'm from the UK, and this is definitely not normal in the UK. It just seems to be some strange (and incorrect IMO) style that the British media has adopted. Their own exceptions (NICE, PC, SAD, UKIP) show the ridiculousness of their policy.
I don't find the list of exceptions so bad. They're ones where you either pronounce the letters ("PC") or where it would be genuinely confusing "SAD").
I guess the question is, what is the value of styling "Aids" such? My assumption is that they would say that such acronyms have become words in English, people understand "Aids" or "Nato" as a "thing" and don't even think of it as an acronym (just like "scuba diving" or "laser" or "radar").
If it has basically become a word, it just slows reading down to write it in all caps.
...but I can see it's a debatable issue. This is probably one of those things where some words will become like "laser" and "radar," and some won't. BBC is trying to be on the forefront in guessing which words will be.
> It is confusing because in English it is almost always spelt AIDS.
The British convention has a clearer mapping between written and spoken language, but leads to ambiguity in the case where there is a name collision between an acronym and the case where there is a collision between an acronym and a common noun and the word occurs in sentence-initial position (or in title case), the latter is also a problem throughout English print usage with proper nouns (instead of acronyms), and the ambiguities that arise in print this way are very nearly a subset of the ambiguities that arise in speech with the same terms. [0]
The non-British usage has worse correspondence between written and spoken language, and leads to ambiguity where there is a collision between an acronym and an initialism, though this is probably rarer. While this may be a less-common situation than the ambiguities produced in the British usage, it is a ambiguity less-closely tied to the inherent ambiguity in speech.
Neither is "incorrect", they are simply different conventions, with different features, and either case the ambiguities produced are usually only theoretical and in practice readily resolved through context.
[0] "Subset" because the speech ambiguities occur indepedently of the conditions that affect casing (initial position in sentence, or title case); "Very nearly" because sometimes terms that are spelled identically and thus would be ambiguous in print are pronounced differently and would be distinct in speech.
It confused me a great deal when it first started making the news in the 80s. But that was because I had a lot of exposure to the other kind of aids due to having a paraplegic living with us for a while, plus I was maybe 8 years old at the time.
> If you wouldn't pronounce it, it's not an acronym
Unfortunately, "acronym" is widely enough used in the broader sense that includes initialisms that this broader and less-useful definition is a well-documented definition (remember that dictionaries are descriptive of language use, not prescriptive), though its certainly better and facilitates more clear communication to consistently distinguish between "acronyms" in the strict sense (those pronounced as words) and "initialisms" and other abbreviations, rather than using "acronyms" in a broad sense, but because of the conflicting definitions in use one must, until and unless the consistent use of the term renders the broader definition non-current and obsolete, expressly indicate that "acronym" is being used in that narrow sense when so doing, otherwise confusion is likely to ensue.
I don't know about English but in German Aids is now a recognized proper word that evolved from the acronym AIDS. But I noticed before that some consistently only capitalize the first letter of acronyms instead of all of them.
The HIV rates in South Africa are among the highest, so does that mean that it's evolution following its course? The ones that react to the Virus would die and the ones that ignore it survive, giving those people a (much?) higher chance of survival and reproduction. Similar to how the superbacterias that are popular now were created in the same place.
There hasn't been enough time for evolution to act in this case. HIV has only been endemic for a generation or so. Bacteria can run through dozens of generations a day, so the process goes much faster there.
Assuming HIV isn't cured, then this defense would probably form the basis of eventual widespread resistance to HIV in humans, perhaps centuries from now. But it didn't arise as a response to HIV.
But with just one generation it should be enough, right? Some individuals are resistant and some others not; the non-resistant ones die and the next generation is of mostly resistant; the next one would be mainly individuals more resistant; etc
Only if exposure is total and death before reproduction highly likely. Even in South Africa, the vast majority of the population isn't infected. Those who are infected still often pass on their genes before they die. Unchecked HIV will certainly increase the concentration of these genes over time, but with the current situation it'll take many generations.
"Adult humans' immune systems tend to go all-out to finish off the virus in a campaign that nearly always ends in failure.
Children have a relatively tolerant immune system, which becomes more aggressive in adulthood - chickenpox, for example, is far more severe in adults due to the way the immune system reacts. "
This is fascinating. It looks like a kid's immune system is in "learning mode" for a while. Which makes sense, gives it time to get exposure to pathogens and compounds.
36 comments
[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 81.5 ms ] threadTests showed they had tens of thousands of human immunodeficiency viruses in every millilitre of their blood.
...
Prof Philip Goulder, one of the researchers from the University of Oxford, told the BBC: 'Essentially, their immune system is ignoring the virus as far as possible.'
'Waging war against the virus is in most cases the wrong thing to do.'"
It's possible similar crossovers to SID > AIDS may have happened many times in the past and due to slow travel and worse healthcare the outbreaks just died out. So, some percentage of the population might have relative immunity to similar diseases.
It's also possible for some new mutation to show up that deals with AIDS over time.
Or, they could be all dead before 30 without treatment it's hard to say.
A lot of stuff doesn't have a "single right answer" it seems.
HIV is probably already evolving a bunch of different strains with variying degrees of mortality and morbidity. Those that tend to remain dormant for longer or otherwise fail to kill the host are more likely to spread faster.
If you consider that plus the fact that humans are already begining to develop defenses, you comment could be qualified as: 90% of people who don't have resistence face worse health outcomes, - up to but not necesarily an early demise, - and end up producing fewer offspring.
Edit: This article explains: http://www.livescience.com/48015-berlin-patient-hiv-treatmen...
virus returned after a couple of months
Initially after that child – the so-called Mississippi baby – was taken off the drugs, there was no virus detectable in her blood, and her doctor claimed a cure. Unfortunately, after four years the virus returned and she had to restart drug treatment. https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn27112-hivs-hiding-pla...
This was in 2007.
This is one of many reasons why radiation therapy patients are so fragile.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/academy/journalism/news-style-guide/art...
> However, our style is to use lower case with an initial cap for acronyms, where you would normally pronounce the set of letters as a word (eg Aids, Farc, Eta, Nafta, Nasa, Opec, Apec).
If you look in google news, only the British media uses Aids and Opec. The rest of the world uses capitalised. I'm from the UK, and this is definitely not normal in the UK. It just seems to be some strange (and incorrect IMO) style that the British media has adopted. Their own exceptions (NICE, PC, SAD, UKIP) show the ridiculousness of their policy.
I guess the question is, what is the value of styling "Aids" such? My assumption is that they would say that such acronyms have become words in English, people understand "Aids" or "Nato" as a "thing" and don't even think of it as an acronym (just like "scuba diving" or "laser" or "radar").
If it has basically become a word, it just slows reading down to write it in all caps.
...but I can see it's a debatable issue. This is probably one of those things where some words will become like "laser" and "radar," and some won't. BBC is trying to be on the forefront in guessing which words will be.
The British convention has a clearer mapping between written and spoken language, but leads to ambiguity in the case where there is a name collision between an acronym and the case where there is a collision between an acronym and a common noun and the word occurs in sentence-initial position (or in title case), the latter is also a problem throughout English print usage with proper nouns (instead of acronyms), and the ambiguities that arise in print this way are very nearly a subset of the ambiguities that arise in speech with the same terms. [0]
The non-British usage has worse correspondence between written and spoken language, and leads to ambiguity where there is a collision between an acronym and an initialism, though this is probably rarer. While this may be a less-common situation than the ambiguities produced in the British usage, it is a ambiguity less-closely tied to the inherent ambiguity in speech.
Neither is "incorrect", they are simply different conventions, with different features, and either case the ambiguities produced are usually only theoretical and in practice readily resolved through context.
[0] "Subset" because the speech ambiguities occur indepedently of the conditions that affect casing (initial position in sentence, or title case); "Very nearly" because sometimes terms that are spelled identically and thus would be ambiguous in print are pronounced differently and would be distinct in speech.
If you wouldn't pronounce it, it's not an acronym
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronym#Nomenclature
In everyday conversation, yeah, they're acronyms.
Unfortunately, "acronym" is widely enough used in the broader sense that includes initialisms that this broader and less-useful definition is a well-documented definition (remember that dictionaries are descriptive of language use, not prescriptive), though its certainly better and facilitates more clear communication to consistently distinguish between "acronyms" in the strict sense (those pronounced as words) and "initialisms" and other abbreviations, rather than using "acronyms" in a broad sense, but because of the conflicting definitions in use one must, until and unless the consistent use of the term renders the broader definition non-current and obsolete, expressly indicate that "acronym" is being used in that narrow sense when so doing, otherwise confusion is likely to ensue.
Assuming HIV isn't cured, then this defense would probably form the basis of eventual widespread resistance to HIV in humans, perhaps centuries from now. But it didn't arise as a response to HIV.
Only for diseases that kill or disable people fast.
Children have a relatively tolerant immune system, which becomes more aggressive in adulthood - chickenpox, for example, is far more severe in adults due to the way the immune system reacts. "
This is fascinating. It looks like a kid's immune system is in "learning mode" for a while. Which makes sense, gives it time to get exposure to pathogens and compounds.