New AIDS-like Disease Attacks Immune System
via Mysterious AIDS-like disease discovered – CBS News.
(AP) Researchers have identified a mysterious new disease that has left scores of people in Asia and some in the United States with AIDS-like symptoms even though they are not infected with HIV.
The patients’ immune systems become damaged, leaving them unable to fend off germs as healthy people do. What triggers this isn’t known, but the disease does not seem to be contagious.
This is another kind of acquired immune deficiency that is not inherited and occurs in adults, but doesn’t spread the way AIDS does through a virus, said Dr. Sarah Browne, a scientist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
She helped lead the study with researchers in Thailand and Taiwan, where most of the cases have been found since 2004. Their report is in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine.
“This is absolutely fascinating. I’ve seen probably at least three patients in the last 10 years or so” who might have had this, said Dr. Dennis Maki, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
It’s still possible that an infection of some sort could trigger the disease, even though the disease itself doesn’t seem to spread person-to-person, he said.
The disease develops around age 50 on average, but does not run in families, which makes it unlikely that a single gene is responsible, Browne said.
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Image courtesy shutterstock / Sebastian Kaulitzki
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Disturbing. Now, also, gonorrhea is becoming immune to all but one treatment.
Normally, I would have faith that medicine would come up with something, but companies are scaling back on fundamental research. They are focusing on the superficial things, in large part because it is becoming too difficult to thread the government needle.
We are beginning to lose the race against other forms of life. Are we going to die out just because we are too stupid to govern ourselves properly? I’m thinking yes.
Gonna need some divine intervention. C’mon, Rapture.
Back in the 80′s, when AIDS blew onto the scene big time, a scientist on one of the Sunday talk shows made a quiet prediction that AIDS or something like it would evolve so as to not need bodily fluid transfer to infect.
I wish I could find that scientist’s name. Google fails me…
Eric
I find the lack of detail about the people who are affected by this disturbing. How do we know for sure whether it’s contagious or not? What are the commonalities between all these people?
Makes me think this is already being PCd to death.
I am not sure why this is being reported as a “mysterious new disease”. Adult onset immunodeficiency (CVID) has been known about for some time. It seeems that the researchers were able to identify a particular antibody present in these individuals which does not explain the mechanism but provides another piece of the puzzle. It is not contagious by definition and the cause is unknown at this time.
Thanks spindok.
Yeah the report is absent anything specific.
This is actually a tremendous time of increasing knowledge of many things scientific, from astronomy to medicine, but even in just those two cases there is a LOT to know. Space is big and stuff zips by unobserved, and we are only just barely getting to know how complex the human body really is and all the weird stuff it does, now and again. Old-style syndromes slowly fall into better understood causes and effects. Immune system dysfunctions are a big topic for new treatments from AIDS to arthritis, and certainly many are NOT contagious as such but are the body’s reactions to environmental assaults – or even just the random passage of time. Plus ninety different causes (singly and in combination) can produce very similar effects but still have to be sorted out one at a time.
So what does this report tell us? Not so much.
Political correctness prevents any investigation of any possible behavioral links with HIV-AIDS, of course.
I have no idea if such a link is there or not, but I do know that no such possibility will be investigated without someone sacrificing his career to do so.