From Outbreak to Epidemic

In this Howard Hughes Medical Institute program, Bisola Ojikutu, director of the Office of International Programs of the Division of AIDS at Harvard Medical School, gives a historical examination of AIDS. In 1981, homosexual men began arriving at U.S. clinics with rare cancers and infections, spurring public anxiety about the mysterious illness that would one day be known as AIDS. See how the medical community worked with sectors in public health, science and advocacy groups to mobilize in response to the deadly epidemic.

Category:

Education

[meesphht]

simple case, misdiagnosis; hammers looking for nails and then greed going after the money. These people have made a real good living off of this so called "epidemic" that has never materialized. How much longer before this con job reaches even the most naive of professionals?

[tryanjohnson]

Great presentation.

[tryanjohnson]

This is great video for idiots who think the White man invented AIDS/HIV. A proud Black women telling the no brained racists whats up!!!  YOU GO GIRL!!!!

[St37One]

The interesting finding here is that the number infected was only 8 out of 72, since you would expect this number to be much higher if this man actually was patient zero, and if he had infact transmitted the disease to his partners. 11% is not even statistically different from what you would find in a purely random sample of the homosexual population, so how can this be interpreted as a signal, or as evidence?

This is circular reasoning run amok!

[jffryfnt]

Drug tests are not tests for antigen responses by the immune system. Drugs elicit particular metabolical pathways where the products can be measured. They do not measure what the immune system does. Antigen specific ELISA's do take advantage of how the immune system works. An HIV virus has proteins. The adaptive immune system will respond to it. The ELISA exploits the adaptive immune response to a given antigen. The antigen in the ELISA is a protein found within the HIV virion.

[jffryfnt]

well first, let's describe what an antigen is: an antigen is a protein. A protein is a series of amino acids assembled in such a way that gives a particular 3d, globular, structure,a shape.Antigens aren't drugs, which are chemical structures not composed of amino acids.Anti-gen, explicitly means it generates an antibody response,ANTIbody GENerating response.Antigen.I've done ELISA's between two different antigens that only differed in one amino acid in the sequence,one amino acid is all it took.

[hivquestions]

antigen specific, yes, but to which antigens? and how many of those antigens are the same ones as for tests for other conditions? i called my local health department to ask someone in their lab about this last month, and they refused to tell me the exact antigens for drug screening and for hiv screening. maybe you can find out and post a video about it so we can get off of this video.

[jffryfnt]

Mere drug users that have never been exposed does not increase the possibility of cross-reactivity in an assay that is highly specific. You have to keep in mind the controls that are used. One control is a bovine serum that is loaded with antigens, yet these wells come up negative. And the ELISA assay isn't the end all be all definitive test. If you turn up positive, further confirmation will be performed. Viral titer being one of them.

[jffryfnt]

here's how the ELISA assay works: the ELISA is an antigen specific test, very highly specific. It tests the ability for cells to respond to a specific antigen. I could perform an ELISA on you right now and test to see if you've ever been exposed to tuberculosis. If the test shows negative, you've never been exposed. Meaning, if I give those cells antigen that they've never 'seen', they won't respond. If they have seen it, they will produce cytokines or antibodies that will show in the assay.

[hivquestions]

wikipedia says that common drug screen testing uses the ELISA test. maybe thats why people who use recreational drugs test positive for hiv.