Posted on 09/29/2003 5:18:01 PM PDT by FairOpinion
FAIRFAX, Va. - Could a smallpox shot protect you from the AIDS virus? It's a tantalizing idea that scientists at George Mason University are studying. Early findings are very preliminary and based on lab tests of a small number of blood samples.
Other AIDS researchers caution against putting too much faith in such early tests, and the George Mason study has not been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal that is standard for major medical breakthroughs.
But Ken Alibek, director of the university's National Center for Biodefense, said the early results are encouraging.
"This could result in some very important work," said Alibek, a former top scientist in the Soviet biological weapons program who came to the United States in 1992. If early results bear out, "this could be a great way to protect people," he said, because the vaccine has been safety-tested, is already in production and has been used successfully on a global scale to eradicate smallpox.
The research was based on a hypothesis that the spread of HIV in central Africa coincided with the decline of smallpox. As smallpox was eliminated and people stopped receiving vaccinations in the early 1980s, the AIDS virus began to spread rapidly.
Alibek said Raymond Weinstein, a fellow researcher at George Mason, approached him with the hypothesis.
"My first reaction was this sounds like some kind of crazy idea. But after some analysis, I realized maybe this is not so crazy," Alibek said.
To test the theory, Alibek and Weinstein studied blood samples from 10 people who received the smallpox vaccination and 10 who did not.
When HIV was introduced into the blood samples of those who had been vaccinated, the virus either failed to grow or its growth was slowed considerably. The study results were statistically significant despite the small sample size, Alibek said.
Wayne Koff, senior vice president for research and development at the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, expressed caution about drawing too many conclusions from such early research.
He also said that pox viruses, like the one used in the smallpox vaccine, have been shown to have a general antiviral effect, but that doesn't necessarily mean they will be effective specifically against the AIDS virus.
"It's preliminary. It's intriguing. But it reminds me of a lot of the data sets we get that are preliminary and intriguing" but don't always pan out, Koff said.
Koff also was skeptical about the hypothesis that the emergence of AIDS in Africa had any connection with the decline of smallpox.
Alibek acknowledged that the research so far cannot tell if the smallpox vaccine produces a response that is specific to the AIDS virus, but on a certain level, he said, it's irrelevant.
"For a person who would be protected, it would not matter if it is specific to HIV" as long as it provides protection, he said.
Based on the research, George Mason University has filed patent applications on the smallpox vaccine's therapeutic use against HIV and AIDS.
Scientists declared smallpox eradicated in 1980, and the widespread vaccination program that contributed to its demise ended. In the early 1980s, the AIDS virus began its rapid spread through central Africa.
Concerns over bioterrorism have prompted federal officials to recommend smallpox vaccines for public health workers. More than 38,000 health-care workers nationwide have received the vaccine in recent months, though fears about the vaccine's side effects have stopped some from getting the shot.
It could stop the spread of AIDS world wide in its tracks and protect people against smallpox, and even other viruses, potentially.
So why can't we get our smallpox vaccines, if we want to?!
So, they stop smallpox, and then AIDS grows into the vacuum left by a virus that has been with humanity for a very long time. I'll be ROTFLMAO it it turns out that AIDS is an opportunistic virus that set in because smallpox was killed off.
The numbers are not reliable; they are extrapolated from extremely limited testing, usually of pregnant mothers. Pregnancy triggers false HIV positives.
Normally I would dismiss a story like this, but the fact that Ken Alibek is involved makes me wonder.
That's right. They stopped vaccinating children. And AIDS started spreading amongst adults, who had been vaccinated.
It got into the U.S. and other nations, and spread amongst adults who had been vaccinated.
I don't buy this. I sure as hell would not bet my life on it.
You read it wrongly, FRiend.
I said that the AIDS epidemic started in adults about the same time that vaccination of children ceased.
The article claims that the smallpox vaccination might PROTECT against AIDS. I was pointing out that the epidemic spread among people who had been vaccinated.
My point was that the smallpox vaccination is NOT a protection from AIDS.
I have read some theories that claim the smallpox vaccination caused or started AIDS. I do not believe this for some very good reasons.
1. Nowadays AIDS is killing younger folks who were NEVER vaccinated against smallpox. It is obviously spread by sexual transmission, dirty needles and a few other causes.
2. I have had several vaccinations against smallpox, the first in the 1950's and the last in the 1980s. I don't have AIDS or HIV, and most of the people in my age group who have similar vaccination histories do not either.
To put a real fine point on it, smallpox vaccine does not cause AIDS, and it won't protect you against it either.
This guy is an idiot as this is a useless patent. All one has to do is to say, I would like a small pox vacination to guard against a terror attack even if you really want it for hiv, and you avoid paying this guy royalties. Plus, the royalties if any should rightly go to the vaccine patent holders because they did the development research and inadvertently did a large scale test on the general population. This guys only contribution is reanalyzing the results of that test. So this guy did not produce the vaccine, did not test the vaccine, and noticed one small thing. If I am the patent officer, his patent gets denied.
It is a little doubtful based on what we think we know now. The two virii (variola and HIV) are of different families, with different vectors, different target tissues, and different cellular etiologies. Variola does, however, exhibit fairly recently-discovered immune-suppressive features, but these are thought to work through lysing specific enzymes while HIV is thought to work through death of progenitor cells such as CD-40. But the history of science is the history of things lots of people thought that turned out to be wrong or incomplete. It's worth a check, at least.
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