AIDS (not quite) CURED.

[Don Coyote]

I think that the direction the research was taking after this discovery was pretty fucking complex... basically trying to figure out if there is a way to alter a recipient's DNA to make them produce their own HIV-resistant cells. We're talking fullscale genetic engineering on a very, VERY advanced level that we think is theoretically possible, but just don't have the technology for yet.

Couple this with the hysteria over genetically altered pants, of all things, and you've got an unreachable cure.

You mean jean splicing?

[Luna]

I think that the direction the research was taking after this discovery was pretty fucking complex... basically trying to figure out if there is a way to alter a recipient's DNA to make them produce their own HIV-resistant cells. We're talking fullscale genetic engineering on a very, VERY advanced level that we think is theoretically possible, but just don't have the technology for yet.

Couple this with the hysteria over genetically altered pants, of all things, and you've got an unreachable cure.

You mean jean splicing?

_{Oh, for fuck's sake...}

[Cardinal Pizza Deliverance.]

I think that the direction the research was taking after this discovery was pretty fucking complex... basically trying to figure out if there is a way to alter a recipient's DNA to make them produce their own HIV-resistant cells. We're talking fullscale genetic engineering on a very, VERY advanced level that we think is theoretically possible, but just don't have the technology for yet.

Couple this with the hysteria over genetically altered pants, of all things, and you've got an unreachable cure.

You mean jean splicing?

You've been here too long.

[Cain]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110603/us_yblog_thelookout/first-man-functionally-cured-of-hiv

Timothy Ray Brown suffered from both leukemia and HIV when he received a bone marrow stem cell transplant in Berlin, Germany in 2007. The transplant came from a man who was immune to HIV, which scientists say about 1 percent of Caucasians are. (According to San Francisco's CBS affiliate, the trait may be passed down from ancestors who became immune to the plague centuries ago. This Wired story says it was more likely passed down from people who became immune to a smallpox-like disease.)

Those two explanations may not be entirely contradictory.   Since we still don't know what the Black Death was actually caused by.

Also I thought the immunity was closer to 8%, but my sources may be out of date.

[Cainad (dec.)]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110603/us_yblog_thelookout/first-man-functionally-cured-of-hiv

Timothy Ray Brown suffered from both leukemia and HIV when he received a bone marrow stem cell transplant in Berlin, Germany in 2007. The transplant came from a man who was immune to HIV, which scientists say about 1 percent of Caucasians are. (According to San Francisco's CBS affiliate, the trait may be passed down from ancestors who became immune to the plague centuries ago. This Wired story says it was more likely passed down from people who became immune to a smallpox-like disease.)

Those two explanations may not be entirely contradictory.   Since we still don't know what the Black Death was actually caused by.

Also I thought the immunity was closer to 8%, but my sources may be out of date.

<threadjack>

Huh? I believe you, but I thought the discussion was more or less settled on "bubonic plague carried by fleas."

More info, further reading, etc.?

[Nephew Twiddleton]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110603/us_yblog_thelookout/first-man-functionally-cured-of-hiv

Timothy Ray Brown suffered from both leukemia and HIV when he received a bone marrow stem cell transplant in Berlin, Germany in 2007. The transplant came from a man who was immune to HIV, which scientists say about 1 percent of Caucasians are. (According to San Francisco's CBS affiliate, the trait may be passed down from ancestors who became immune to the plague centuries ago. This Wired story says it was more likely passed down from people who became immune to a smallpox-like disease.)

Those two explanations may not be entirely contradictory.   Since we still don't know what the Black Death was actually caused by.

Also I thought the immunity was closer to 8%, but my sources may be out of date.

<threadjack>

Huh? I believe you, but I thought the discussion was more or less settled on "bubonic plague carried by fleas."

More info, further reading, etc.?

It's my understanding that further tests were done on Black Death victims' remains, which had indicated that they definitely died of Y. pestis infection.

[Cain]

Maybe there was.

But a lot of scientists, historians and scientist-historians reject that the bubonic plauge was repsonsible for all outbreaks of what was recorded as the Black Death.  In particular, there are concerns about the spread of the plague, the fact that the plague appeared to occur heavily in the winter months (when it should have receded, with rat populations) and the reporting of symptoms, not all of which readily map onto what you would necessarily expect from bubonic plague sufferers.

Most historians seem to take a middle road, where an outbreak of bubonic plauge was complicated by other, complimentary epidemics that struck in the same period.  But some go even further, in saying that bubonic plague was not the culprit.

I'll transcribe a source on the debate in a bit.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

There were multiple sweeping outbreaks of the Black Death, and not all of them were consistent with the epidemiological patterns of Y. Pestis, and in fact match viral contagion patterns much more closely, particularly the insanely high mortality rates in some areas. Some of that is fairly suitably explained by the fact that for several years it had been cold and there had been heavy rains throughout the growing season, causing widespread famine and very weakened immune systems, while simultaneously pushing rats from fields into villages in pursuit of food. It was like a perfect storm of famine, war, and contagion. The problem is that if there was also a virus that was sweeping the continent concurrently with Y. Pestis, it's not one that still exists, so there's no way to confirm it, at least not with current technology.

[Cain]

In the pages of several issues of the British medical journal Lancet: Infectious Diseases in 2002 and 2003, scientists argued over whether the Black Death was bubonic plague. By then the debate was a quarter of a century old. Among those who think it was not bubonic plague are the historians Koenraad Bleukx and Samuel Cohn, anthropologist James Wood,and the scientists Graham Twigg, Susan Scott,and Christopher Duncan. Bleukx, Twigg, and Scottand Duncan all write about England, Cohn and Wood more broadly: "Both clinical pathological and historical facts simply do not square with the[bubonic]plague syndrome" (Bleukx)."It is a biological impossibility that bubonic plague had any role in the Great Pestilence" (Scott and Duncan; they go on to list twenty distinct differences). It "was any disease other than the rat-based bubonic plague" (Cohn).

From the works of these and other scholars emerge seven main lines of criticism.  First, these critics agree that the medieval descriptions of symptoms do not necessarily add up to bubonic plague.Bleukx suggests that typhus, cholera, smallpox, and anthrax could all fit the same basic profile. Cohn claims that scrub typhus, filarialorchitis, relapsing fever, malaria, typhoid, and glandular fever all can produce buboes. Medical researcher Stephen Ell lists eighteen diseases that he says can mimic bubonic plague's symptoms,and he reminds his readers that only careful clinical descriptions can be the basis of a sound diagnosis. Another medical researcher, Thomas Butler, mentions that tularemia is characterized by fever and buboes and that staphylococcusaureus, streptococcuspyrogenes, infectious mononucleosis, and some venereal diseases can also cause intense lymphatic swelling.

Biologist Twigg finds anthrax to be a good fit. On the other hand, Ann Carmichael, who holds doctorates in both medicine and history, counters that "there is no other disease [than bubonic plague] that characteristically produces acute enlargement of the regional lymphnodes, visible in the groin, under the arms, in the neck or behind the ears. "Nonetheless, she wrote a decade earlier, "It seems more reasonable to consider the full range of probable infections than to search for a possible explanation which would preserve a retrospective diagnosis of plague."

Second, the Black Death seems to have been far more contagious than the Third Pandemic's bubonic plague. Even at the height of modern outbreaks, the rates of infection in a locale are far below the numbers reported during the era of the Black Death. Twigg points out the discrepancy between estimated medieval mortality rates of 20 to 50 percent and modern "overall mortality rates of under 1 percent." Even allowing for medieval exaggeration, to such critics the numbers seem all out of proportion.

Third, movement of the medieval pestilence from one locale to an-other seems far too swift. Anthropologist Wood summed it up: "This disease appears to spread too rapidly among humans to be something that first must be established in wild rodent populations, like bubonic plague," and he added, "it was clearly spread by person-to-person transmission." J. F. Shrewsbury, who accepted bubonic plague as the Black Death, nonetheless argued that population densities of both humans and rats in England were far too low for spread of the disease to have been as fast or thorough as described and the human infection rate as high as reported. Few scholars accept that the movement of rats or other rodents across the countryside could have occurred at speeds necessary to account for the spread. Could infected people have brought the fleas from one village or city to the next before the symptoms set in? Could enough diseased rats and fleas have been transported across Europe, North Africa, and the Near East to account for this rapidity? Critics doubt it.

Sixth, modern bubonic plague outbreaks last locally for years, becom-ing enzootic, but the Black Death swept through areas far more rapidly, usually lasting four to nine months, and then disappearing with no cases of pestilence for several years.

Seventh, critics point out that over time the lethality of the medieval pestilence dropped for no clear reason linked to modern understanding of bubonic plague. Unlike modern medicine, medieval medicine did nothing effective to prevent or cure cases of bubonic plague. A logical reply is that people became immune or resistant to bubonic plague by previous exposure in nonlethal doses: the body was able to develop the antibodies necessary to fight off the bacillus. Ell claims "survivors of plague infection have a potent immunity," but Biraben, Carmichael, and Benedictow disagree, or at least they would qualify the claim by saying that immunity is short-lived: depending on the individual "from some months to several years." Cohn flatly denies the possibility, stating that modern "human hosts have no natural or acquired immunity." Ell, however, also states that typhus and at least one form of leprosy confer immunity to bubonic plague, as do various species of salmonella, a cause of food poisoning that, he notes, "may safely be assumed to have been ubiquitous" in medieval Europe. An earlier outbreak of typhus may have immunized many Milanese in 1348, for indeed the city of Milan was barely touched by the pestilence. Critics of "Black Death as bubonic plague," however, dismiss any notion of large-scale immunization.

Scott and Duncan contend there was no medieval bubonic plague in England. They concede that there may have been simultaneous bubonic plague in the Mediterranean and elsewhere. They are convinced, however, that in England it was a viral (rather than bacterial) agent that caused an as-yet unidentified hemorrhagic fever, not unlike Ebola, which was the English Black Death. Infection would have been person-to-person, and people could be carriers—having and passing on the virus—for a long period before the symptoms hit. No rats, no fleas, no problems with seasons, and, at least theoretically, the symptoms fit. In fact, medieval English sources tend to be rather vague on specific symptoms.

All of this is from Chapter Two of The Black Death (2004) edited by J. Byrne.

Also

Molecular biologist Stephen O'Brien reported that "a historic strong selective event" created a mutation in cells that benefits about 15 percent of the modern Caucasian population. In these descendents of Europeans the CCR5 receptors on cells are different from the norm, in that they do not allow the HIV to enter the cell and begin copying itself. O'Brien's team dated the event that sparked the mutation to about "700 years ago," and thus it may well have been the Black Death and its recurrences.

[Faust]

[Cainad (dec.)]

Cool stuff! Thanks.

[Chairman Risus]

There were multiple sweeping outbreaks of the Black Death, and not all of them were consistent with the epidemiological patterns of Y. Pestis, and in fact match viral contagion patterns much more closely, particularly the insanely high mortality rates in some areas. Some of that is fairly suitably explained by the fact that for several years it had been cold and there had been heavy rains throughout the growing season, causing widespread famine and very weakened immune systems, while simultaneously pushing rats from fields into villages in pursuit of food. It was like a perfect storm of famine, war, and contagion. The problem is that if there was also a virus that was sweeping the continent concurrently with Y. Pestis, it's not one that still exists, so there's no way to confirm it, at least not with current technology.

Maybe there was.

But a lot of scientists, historians and scientist-historians reject that the bubonic plauge was repsonsible for all outbreaks of what was recorded as the Black Death.  In particular, there are concerns about the spread of the plague, the fact that the plague appeared to occur heavily in the winter months (when it should have receded, with rat populations) and the reporting of symptoms, not all of which readily map onto what you would necessarily expect from bubonic plague sufferers.

Most historians seem to take a middle road, where an outbreak of bubonic plauge was complicated by other, complimentary epidemics that struck in the same period.  But some go even further, in saying that bubonic plague was not the culprit.

I'll transcribe a source on the debate in a bit.

You jerk offs, it was God's wrath.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

There were multiple sweeping outbreaks of the Black Death, and not all of them were consistent with the epidemiological patterns of Y. Pestis, and in fact match viral contagion patterns much more closely, particularly the insanely high mortality rates in some areas. Some of that is fairly suitably explained by the fact that for several years it had been cold and there had been heavy rains throughout the growing season, causing widespread famine and very weakened immune systems, while simultaneously pushing rats from fields into villages in pursuit of food. It was like a perfect storm of famine, war, and contagion. The problem is that if there was also a virus that was sweeping the continent concurrently with Y. Pestis, it's not one that still exists, so there's no way to confirm it, at least not with current technology.

Maybe there was.

But a lot of scientists, historians and scientist-historians reject that the bubonic plauge was repsonsible for all outbreaks of what was recorded as the Black Death.  In particular, there are concerns about the spread of the plague, the fact that the plague appeared to occur heavily in the winter months (when it should have receded, with rat populations) and the reporting of symptoms, not all of which readily map onto what you would necessarily expect from bubonic plague sufferers.

Most historians seem to take a middle road, where an outbreak of bubonic plauge was complicated by other, complimentary epidemics that struck in the same period.  But some go even further, in saying that bubonic plague was not the culprit.

I'll transcribe a source on the debate in a bit.

You jerk offs, it was God's wrath.

[Nast]

Caucasian bone marrow is about to sky rocket in value.
Youd better buy up all you can before its to late.

Quick, whats the shelf life for bone marrow?

If you keep it in a tub of water in the refrigerator, and changing the water frequently as it turns from pink to ruddy, it should keep for a few days.
Or, you can wrap it and freeze it and it should be okay for a few weeks.

If you uh... want to cook with it, that is.