Aids Miracle
Wolfie — November 13, 2005, 12:47 pm
There is an article in the news that claims an Englishman has cured himself of the HIV virus, apparently with his own immune system. If true this will be a remarkable step forward in the global fight against the disease. Another first for the British perhaps?
“It’s just a flesh-wound.”
The surprising thing is that there’s nothing surprising about it at all really. What’s probably more surprising is that the medical profession are quoted as expressing surprise themselves. (err.. if you can follow that).
Once you get a handle on how viruses work it can be pretty well predicted that either an individual somewhere will have natural immunity or will be able to develop it. There’s a huge misconception about how viruses work and the co-evolution which is involved. Sadly this is fostered mainly by the media rather than actual scientists involved.i
Even if you go with the idea that HIV was bio-engineered by the US weapons divisions (a theory I think which has a lot going for it) it makes bioweapons problematic for a number of reasons. Firstly that there will always be people who either develop or have a natural immunity - or - the weaponised virus will burn itself out too quickly before achieving optimum spread rate. (Forest fire theory c/w 1918 influenza virus outbreaks http://www.stanford.edu/group/virus/uda/ - note the huge epidemiological difference in the effects of the subsequent outbreaks).
Even if you did engineer a virus it still has to obey the same “laws” of evolution and succession. The purpose of a virus isn’t, as we were taught in school, or in the media, “to kill”. It is just to survive. It’s a badly-adapted virus which kills its potential host. The most successful viruses achieve true symbiosis and take a free evolutionary ride on the back of its’ host. Weaponised or “bad” viruses will always tend to get deselected for the most obvious reasons. Hence it would be essential for them to be propagated by other means such as vaccination programs.
But thats a whole other story