Drug Companies Seek Profit Instead of Cure For AIDS

[glaeken]

Have any of the conspiracy theorists on this thread considered that AIDS research is being done all over the world. Even if the FDA were corrupt and suppressing a cure for the sake of the drug companies it would only be able to do so in the U.S.

What's to say the cure has to be discovered in the U.S.? What if it was discovered in another country. For the drug companies to do what you suggest the equivalent of the FDA in that country would also have to be corrupt.

If the FDA were involved in surpressing it then it would have to have been submitted to the FDA for approval by someone. Because of the significance of an AIDS cure if someone had a cure they would have held a press conference looooooong before they submitted it to the FDA for approval and news of this would have received worldwide attention. Now if it happened I certainly didn't hear about it.

Assuming the conspiracy is true, with a secret this big it would be rather difficult to keep a lid on it. If a cure indeed existed it would have to have been worked on by a large group of people and a lot of people at the FDA would have been involved. All you need is one person to step forward and with something as significant as this it's likely that at least one person would speak up.

 

[1hornychinaman]

**LONG POST, but I hope you read it, I get the sense a lot of people don't understand HIV/AIDS so read this, get a basic idea of virology and then comment.**

I dont think the general public (and terbites too, sorry!) understands HIV very clearly. Yes it's a virus, but in virological terms, it's a freaking damn good one. People measure the success of a virus by how horrific the death is or how quickly they kill, case-in-point, Ebola. Say it and everyone gets this image of instant death. But if you were a virus you dont want that, you want a slow lingering death to maximize the chance for infection. See with Ebola, it's frighteningly efficient of a killer, and in strict sense too effective. What happens is that it kills so quickly that after a couple of days the population either dies out, or acquire immunity towards it. The virus has no one to infect anymore and dies off with the population.
HIV is completely different. The gestation period for HIV to manifest to AIDS can take a couple of months to years. As a result the amount of people that can be possibly be infected are maximized provided we continue to boink like bunnies. What makes HIV so fantastically successful is that it lacks many mechanisms to repair DNA damage from replication. Think of it this way, when DNA replicates it unwinds from it’s double helix and then it copies itself with free nucleotides in a very specific manner, adenine with thymine, guanine with cytosine. Now think of about this, we have a close to 100 trillion cells in our body, and the majority of them are multiplying… at this rate how many mistakes can do you think will occur in this replication phase? Well, a lot. Evolutionally, our bodies have created these “spellcheckers” to go through our genetic code to make sure it gets copied correctly every time. This prevents mistakes from being made and if mistakes are made, a signal is sent for the cell to self destruct.
Now what does this have to do with HIV/AIDS and the original topic? Well HIV lacks many of the repair mechanisms (or spellcheckers) that we have. And because of this HIV virus is a highly polymorphic (meaning it mutates a lot) virus. That’s why there’s an every changing AIDS cocktail people have to take, one drug to counter symptom A, then one to counter the side effects of drug A… which changes all the time in response to the HIV virus.
The point I’m trying to get at, is that because HIV is inherently so prone to mutating, understanding the virus is extremely difficult to do so, creating a vaccine is monumentally hard because the virus changes so rapidly. I don’t think the drug companies don’t want to make a vaccine, but they can’t economically do so and stay afloat. Drugs take too long to come to market (it’s estimated that each successful drug costs over 1.2 billion to produce from R&D up to marketing). I’d leave it to the government like many have said, but it’s not because drug companies don’t want to develop cures but because they can’t feasibly do it.