More people living with HIV then ever before

[JSt0rm]

Not an anti-BIOTIC.

shhhh...

Don't tell him. Its more amusing.

 

[sandorski]

The 1980's called, it wants its' ignorant talking points back.

 

[Nebor]

Its just a matter of time before we have a type of anti-biotic for viral infections.

 

[crashtestdummy]

BTW crashtestdummy, white people are slightly more immune to HIV infection. I think it's something like a 5% difference though, not huge.

10% of Northern Europens have at least one copy of the CCR5 gene that Texashiker keeps talking about. 1 allele delays, but does not prevent AIDS onset, meaning that it actually puts the population as a whole at more risk for infection. We can discuss if inducing this mutation in people would improve things, but for now it does very little to prevent infection on a population-wide basis.

I am going to rebuke your post by saying the people that were sold into slavery came from isolated tribes that had never come into contact with European diseases.

Without scientific proof, we are guessing.

They were not from "isolated tribes," as you say. They were from West African regions that had close contact with Arab traders for centuries. Furthermore, they also had domesticated animals, where most of these diseases come from. The Native Americans, by contrast, had no domesticated animals other than llamas, alpacas, and dogs.

There's actually an enormous volume of scientific support for this view. If you want a good place to start, I recommend Guns, Germs and Steel. It's eminently readable (and one of my favorite books), and does a good job explaining the impact of environment and geography on the development of civilizations. One of the main features of the book is to show how the availability of domesticable animals exposed Eurasians to far more diseases, and that while those diseases ravaged them for centuries, they developed partial immunities to them. When the Europeans came to America, they brought their diseases with them and devastated a population that wasn't able to defend itself. So no, I am not simply guessing.

Are you saying we will "never" have a cure for a viral infection?

I will never say never, but it will be exceptionally difficulty to develop a general viral cure that is more effective than your adaptive immune system. Vaccines are a much more attractive goal (as an aid to your immune system), but even this is difficult in the case of HIV.