HIV Strikes Fast, Study Finds

By Zoe Elizabeth Buck, The News & Observer, Raleigh, N.C.

Jul. 25--HIV infects and attacks the body within days -- much faster than previously thought -- drastically narrowing the window of time when intervention is possible, Duke University researchers have found.

This means clinicians must test more and sooner if they hope to catch an infection before it can be transmitted to someone else.

"We're just going to have to be much more aggressive in identifying the infection early on," said Dr. Peter Leone, the state's HIV/AIDS health director and an associate professor in the UNC-Chapel Hill schools of medicine and public health.

Knowledge of what goes on immediately after transmission of the virus is essential to understanding what kind of vaccine will be effective, a discovery especially important in the wake of two recent failed attempts to find a shot that works.

On Thursday, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, the main federal agency in charge of AIDS research, called for scientists to return to a basic question: What happens when the virus is transmitted?

"Design of a vaccine that blocks HIV infection will require enormous intellectual leaps beyond present-day knowledge," concluded a broad team of institute researchers writing in today's edition of the journal Science. The team said the focus of research should be on discovery of a vaccine rather than on clinical trials for evaluating medicines that may or may not work.

The Duke results, which will be published in the August issue of the Journal of Virology, exemplify that type of scientific inquiry.

The research team was led by Dr. Barton Haynes, director of the Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology. The center, a consortium of research institutions founded in 2005 with headquarters at Duke, was the beginning of a larger shift in HIV/AIDS research that culminated in Thursday's announcement by the federal institute, Haynes said.

Faster diagnoses

The center's research has significantly changed the way scientists look at HIV. For years, doctors thought the virus was a stealth infection and couldn't be diagnosed for months. Researchers at UNC-CH proved several years ago that the virus can be detected within weeks. Now the Duke team has whittled the time frame further, to days.

"It was stunning to see how quickly the immune system was affected," said Haynes, who is the lead author on the study.

To deal with the shrinking window, clinicians can check for the presence of HIV more often, but the potential for catching cases early enough for intervention looks bleak. The earliest and most infectious stage of HIV has vague and practically unnoticable symptoms.

"It looks like HIV does a lot of damage very early on," Haynes said. "Now we feel that the opportunity to intervene most effectively may range from about five to seven days after infection."

Doctors are going to have to start screening patients for the HIV virus even if they come in with what seems like a headache or a common cold, Leone said.

"We can narrow that window down, but we're never going to be able to identify all of these folks," Leone said. "We just can't."

HIV is the virus that causes AIDS. Worldwide, about 3 million cases of the disease are diagnosed each year.

North Carolina, which identifies about 2,000 cases of HIV a year, is ahead of the game in identifying the infection early. The state pioneered a program six years ago that tests for HIV in the genetic material of patients even if they pass an AIDS test.

Still, Leone said, clinicians need to be recognizing the infection earlier and routinely considering HIV when someone comes in with an illness.

Nailing down basics

The Duke results may seem unsettling, but experts agree that the scientific building blocks of the disease need to be fully understood. In the past, global pressure has pushed vaccines into testing stages too quickly.

"There's tremendous pressure to develop a bio-agent that is effective," said Dr. Myron Cohen, leader of the Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology's clinical division and a UNC-Chapel Hill professor. "Candidate products may have been pushed forward faster than they would have in a situation with less gravity."

Sacrificing depth of understanding for speed has had consequences. A drug taken to trials by the pharmaceutical giant Merck not only failed to prevent the contraction of HIV but appeared to have increased recipients' chances of infection. The trial was abruptly halted last fall.

And just last week, another vaccine trial was killed because not enough was known about how the virus attacks the immune system.

In March, in the wake of the failed Merck trial, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases held a summit on the future of vaccine research. Basic scientific research, like that behind the Duke discovery, could "yield greater understanding of how a successful HIV vaccine might be designed," the federal institute said in its Thursday news release.

"We are learning what a vaccine needs to do that is different from existing vaccines," Haynes said. "Unlike measles, mumps, rubella, HIV puts its genetic material among the chromosomes of your genetic material, and we need to stop it before that occurs.

"HIV gets a head start on everyone before the body gets a chance to fight back."

10 Things Doctors Say - (and what they really mean)

We don’t know how it works, but it works

It suppresses symptoms in the short term, but it may result in your penis dropping off in ten years’ time.

You don’t need it anyway.

We don’t really understand the function of this particular organ.

I’ve been a doctor for 30 years.

I’ve been making the same mistakes for 30 years and nobody else has ever complained.

I’m just going to take a few pictures.

This is the first of a battery of tests.

This drug has no adverse effects.

I seem to have temporarily misplaced my Physician’s Desk Reference.

I’ll be monitoring your progress closely over the next few months.

I need the extra money to pay for my new Bungalow in Runda.

It’s probably caused by a virus.

I don’t know what causes it.

Any responsible parent would do the same.

I vaccinated my child, so what’s your problem?

I’ll be utilising the latest surgical technology.

I’ve been watching one of my colleagues do this procedure for the last month and I’m itching to have a go myself.

Where on earth did you read that?

One of these days I’m going to drop a bomb on those people at What Doctors Don’t Tell You!

10 SITUATIONS WHERE YOU DON’T USUALLY NEED A MEDICAL DOCTOR

1. Backache. Research demonstrates that for most cases of lower back pain, chiropractic or osteopathy works far better than any thing medicine has to offer.

2. Ear ache. In most cases, time, mullein oil, a woolly hat or a hot water bottle works far better than antibiotics in curing ear ache, according to numerous studies.

3. Fever. Fever is your body’s extremely clever method of killing foreign bugs of all varieties and shouldn’t be suppressed. Rather than worrying about the exact degrees, it’s more important to deter mine whether the problem is serious — s ay, meningitis. Fevers for ordinary viral and bacterial infections won’t exceed 105 degrees, which isn’t dangerous.

4. Infection. For common or garden infection s, first try working with a herbalist, who will prescribe Echinacea or Berberis, rather than antibiotic s.

5. Just in case checkups, particularly if you are over 50. If you have nothing blatantly wrong with you, going to a doctor won’t necessarily protect you but is likely to unleash the entire arsenal of his testing apparatus.

6. Menopause. Unless you are among the very small percentage of women who don’t respond to other measures, holistic measures (diet, homeopathy, herbs) will help you through the change in a safer way than any doctor.

7. Chronic but not life - threatening diseases. Eczema, psoriasis, non-life-threatening asthma all respond better to alternative measures than drugs, which only suppress symptoms.

8. Slimming. All a doctor usually has to offer is drugs, and numerous slimming drugs have been found to be life-threatening. Allergies are one of the major causes of over weight, as are calorie-poor slimming diets.

9. Colds and flu. Unless you are elderly and your immune system is compromised in some way, there is nothing your doctor can give you or your child that will improve a cold or flu. Bed rest, plenty of fluids, lemon and honey drinks and homoeopathy help; antibiotics cannot.

10. Acne. Again, all your doctor has is drugs with horrendous side effects to offer you. Try diet and allergy treatment first.

Multivitamins: The new spin that claims they are killers

A new war front is emerging in the Medical field between drug Manufacturers and Nutritionists like me…hehehehe.

Its emerging that the more and more people take vitamins the less they are likely to fall sick. And especially after a Harvard Research in Tanzania showed that the progress of the AIDS disease was dramatically slowed after pregnant HIV-Positive mothers were given vitamin supplement.

Now Medical researchers are tying themselves up in knots in order to get people off nutritional solutions. The latest comes from Harvard, which claims that multi-vitamins may be bad for us – and could even cause cancer.Despite numerous studies that have found that antioxidants found in Vitamins are vital for good long-term health, the Harvard research team concludes that antioxidant supplements not only don’t protect against heart disease or cancer, they also “in some cases may actually do more harm than good.”Turning to the B vitamins – B6, B12 and folic acid – the researchers say the B vitamins don’t prevent heart disease and, worse, folic acid may cause cancer. They point to a study of men who were taking 1000 mcg of folic acid – more than twice the recommended daily amount – and they developed more colorectal adenoma and prostate cancers than those taking a placebo. However, every participant was already at high risk of developing colorectal cancer before the trial began.

Of course these guys are going to win and we will lose and we shall continue using their highly toxic drugs to treat pathogens some of which are resistant to the drugs.

Surely the NEW WORLD ORDER is here.

Broccoli: Why it’s so good for us

It’s called the king of vegetables, and scientists are getting closer to understanding just exactly why broccoli has so many health-giving qualities. Broccoli and other cruciferous vegetables can boost the immune system, and fight the free radicals that damage our cells.

Broccoli’s secret ingredient is a chemical called sulforaphane, which can switch on a set of antioxidant genes and enzymes in immune cells that help fight disease and the effects of ageing.Our bodies lose their natural disease-fighting abilities as we age, and so vegetables such as broccoli can help replace that which the years have taken away.

Researchers from the School of Medicine at UCLA have discovered that sulforaphane in broccoli reverses the decline in cellular immune function in a test on mice. The chemical was especially effective in kick-starting the dendritic cells, which also improve immune functioning.

(Source: University of California – Los Angeles, March 10, 2008).

Coconut Oil – What we are missing

I thought I would share something about the oils that we eat on a daily basis. I one of my research I came across Coconut oil – that was a shocker because every time I go to uchumi, tuskys, ukwala, Nakuru mattress (Nakumatt) I have never seen Coconut oil in the counter. Instead I see Chipsy, Kimbo, Kasuku, Jogoo, Tily etc etc. When I was like 5 years old, all I remember seeing is Kimbo and Elianto and the other yellow one…can’t remember the name. Over the past two decades I somehow became allergic to Kimbo despite longtime usage. In trying to understand this allergy to Kimbo I started using the one from Kapa Oil refineries and there was no allergy.

I concluded that something has changed in the Kimbo fat (highly possible) or something has changed in my immune system (less likely) to cause over reaction to hydrocarbons in Kimbo.

So what am I driving at? Our grandparents would live for close to over 10 decades and nowadays for anyone to even clock 50yrs it’s a miracle. The toxins found in the stuff that we eat, apply on our bodies, hair, lips, etc are considerable enough to alter our body’s chemistry.

Exit Kimbo, Enter Coconut oil. Am sure that everyone knows that Coconut oil is bad for you heart bla bla bla because it has bad fats in it. That’s what we are made to believe, but how come they don’t tell us that coconut fruit or the madafu that guys drink at the coast is bad! Think about it, they are hiding something. Coconut is naturally occurring and hence very cheap. The oil from coconut is also extremely cheap and full of health benefits. I will highlight some of the benefits of using coconut oil.

Hair Care: Coconut oil is one of the best natural nutrition for hair. It helps in healthy growth of hair providing them a shinny complexion. Regular massage of head with coconut oil ensures that your scalp is free of dandruff, lice, and lice eggs, even if your scalp is dry. Coconut oil is extensively used in the Indian sub-continent for hair care (ever wondered why Indian ladies have very long hair). It is an excellent conditioner and helps in the re-growth of damaged air. It also provides the essential proteins required for nourishing damaged hair. It is therefore used as a hair care oil and used in manufacturing various conditioners, and dandruff creams.
Stress Relief: Coconut oil is very soothing and hence it helps in removing stress. Applying coconut oil to the head helps in removing mental fatigue.
Skin Care: Coconut oil is an excellent massage oil for the skin as well. It acts as an effective moisturizer on all types including dry skin. The benefit of coconut oil on the skin is comparable to that of mineral oil. Further, unlike mineral oil, there is no chance of having any adverse side effects on the skin with the application of coconut oil. Coconut oil therefore is a safe solution for preventing dryness and flaking of skin. It also delays wrinkles, and sagging of skin which normally comes with age. Coconut oil also helps in treating various skin problems including psoriasis, dermatitis, eczema and other skin infections. Therefore coconut oil forms the basic ingredient of various body care products such as soaps, lotions, creams, etc., used for skin care.
Premature Aging: Coconut oil helps in preventing premature aging and degenerative diseases due to its antioxidant properties.
Heart Diseases: There is a misconception spread among many people that coconut oil is not good for the heart. This is because it contains a large quantity of saturated fats. However, coconut oil is beneficial for the heart. It contains about 50% lauric acid, which helps in preventing various heart problems including heart burns, high cholesterol levels and high blood pressure. The saturated fats present in coconut oil are not harmful as it happens in case of other vegetables oils. It does not lead to increase in LDL and HDL levels. It also reduces the incidence of injury in arteries and therefore helps in preventing atherosclerosis.
Weight Loss: Coconut oil is very useful in reducing weight. It contains short and medium-chain fatty acids that help in taking off excessive weight. It is also easy to digest as it helps in healthy functioning of the thyroid and enzymes systems. Further, it increases the body metabolism by removing stress on pancreases, thereby burning out more energy and helping obese and overweight people reduce their weight. Hence, people living in tropical coastal areas, who eat coconut oil daily as their primary cooking oil, are not fat, obese or overweight.
Pancreatitis: Coconut oil is also useful in treating pancreatitis.
Digestion: Internal use of coconut oil occurs primarily as cooking oil. Coconut oil helps in improving the digestive system and thus prevents various stomach and digestion related problems including irritable bowel syndrome. The saturated fats present in coconut oil have anti microbial properties and help in dealing with various bacteria, fungi, parasites, etc., that cause indigestion. Coconut oil also helps in absorption of other nutrients such as vitamins, minerals and amino acids.
Immunity: Coconut oil is also good for the immune system. It strengthens the immune system as it contains antimicrobial lipids, lauric acid, capric acid and caprylic acid which have antifungal, antibacterial and antiviral properties. The human body converts lauric acid into monolaurin which helps in dealing with viruses and bacteria causing diseases such as herpes, influenza, cytomegalovirus, and even HIV. It helps in fighting harmful bacteria such as listeria monocytogenes and heliobacter pylori, and harmful protozoa such as giardia lamblia.
Healing: When applied on infections, it forms a chemical layer which protects the infected body part from external dust, air, fungi, bacteria and virus. The curative properties of coconut oil are useful in healing as well. It speeds up the repairing of damaged tissues.
Infections: Coconut oil is very effective against a variety of infections due to its antifungal, antiviral, and antibacterial properties. According to the Coconut Research Center, coconut oil kills viruses that cause influenza, measles, hepatitis, herpes, SARS, etc. It also kills bacteria that cause ulcers, throat infections, urinary tract infections, pneumonia, and gonorrhea, etc. Coconut oil is also effective on fungi and yeast that cause candidiasis, ringworm, athlete's foot, thrush, diaper rash, etc.
Liver: The presence of medium chain triglycerides and fatty acids helps in preventing liver diseases as they substances are easily converted into energy when they reach the liver, thus reducing work load on the liver and also preventing accumulation of fat.
Kidney: Coconut oil helps in preventing kidney and gall bladder diseases. It also helps in dissolving kidney stones.
Diabetes: Coconut oil helps in controlling blood sugar, and improves the secretion of insulin. It also helps in effective utilization of blood glucose, thereby preventing and treating diabetes.
Bones: As mentioned earlier, coconut oil improves the ability of our body to absorb important minerals. These include calcium and magnesium which are necessary for development of bones. Thus coconut oil is very useful to women who are prone to osteoporosis after middle age.
Dental Care: Calcium is an important element present in teeth. Since coconut oil facilitates absorption of calcium by the body, it helps in getting strong teeth. Coconut oil also stops tooth decay.
HIV and Cancer: It is believed that coconut oil plays an instrumental role in reducing viral susceptibility of HIV and cancer patients. In a study that was performed in Phillipines, Dr. Conrado S. Dayrit, MD. FACC. FPCC. FPCP proved that consuming 3.5 tablespoons of coconut oil daily reduced HIV virus in the blood by up to 55% with no side effects. No further scientific research has been conducted.

What Most Doctors Won't Tell You About Colds and Flus

The next time that you experience a cold or the flu, remember to give your body plenty of rest while allowing the cold or flu to run its course is good for your health.

Conventional medicine and the pharmaceutical industry would want you to believe that there is no "cure" for the common cold and flu, that you should protect yourself against the flu with a vaccine that is full of toxic chemicals, and that during the midst of a cold or flu, it is favorable to ease your discomfort with a variety of medications that can suppress your symptoms (coldcap, flucid…name them).

Unfortunately, all three of these positions represent a lack of understanding of what colds and flus really are, and what they mean to your body.

Colds and flus are causes by viruses. So to understand what colds and flus do at a cellular level, you have to understand what all viruses flu & cold inclusive do at a cellular level.
Do you remember learning about cellular division in high school? Each of your cells are called parent cells, and through processes of genetic duplication (mitosis) and cellular division (cytokinesis), each of your parent cells divides into two daughter cells. Each daughter cell is then considered a parent cell that will divide into two more daughter cells, and so on, and so on, and so on.

Viruses are different from your cells in that they cannot duplicate themselves through mitosis and cytokinesis. Viruses are nothing but microscopic particles of genetic material, each coated by a thin layer of protein.

Due to their design, viruses are not able to reproduce on their own. The only way that viruses can flourish in your body is by using the machinery and metabolism of your cells to produce multiple copies of themselves.
Once a virus has gained access into one of your cells, depending on the type of virus involved, one of two things can happen:
1. The virus uses your cell's resources to replicate itself many times over and then breaks open (lyses) the cell so that the newly replicated viruses can leave in search of new cells to infect. Lysis effectively kills your cell. That’s what the HIV virus does to Immune Cells.
2. The virus incorporates itself into the DNA of your cell, which allows the virus to be passed on to each daughter cell that stems from this cell. Later on, the virus in each daughter cell can begin replicating itself as described above. Once multiple copies of the virus have been produced, the cell is lysed.

Both possibilities lead to the same result: eventually, the infected cell die due to lysis.
Here is the key to understanding why colds and flus, when allowed to run their course while you rest, can be good for you:

By and large, the viruses that cause the common cold and the flu infect mainly your weakest cells; cells that are already burdened with excessive waste products and toxins are most likely to allow viruses to infect them. These are cells that you want to get rid of anyway, to be replaced by new, healthy cells.

So in the big scheme of things, a cold or flu is a truly natural tool that can allow your body to purge itself of old and damaged cells that, in the absence of viral infection, would normally take much longer to identify, destroy, and eliminate.

Have you ever been amazed by how much "stuff" you could blow out of your nose while you had a cold or the flu? Embedded within all of that mucous are countless dead cells that your body is saying good bye to, largely due to the lytic effect of viruses.

So you see, there never needs to be a cure for the common cold, since the common cold is nature's way of keeping you healthy over the long term. And so long as you get plenty of rest and strive to stay hydrated and properly nourished during a cold or flu, there is no need to get vaccinated or to take medications that suppress congested sinuses, a fever, or coughing. All of these uncomfortable symptoms are actually ways in which your body works to eliminate waste products and/or help your body get through a cold or flu. It's fine to use over-the-counter pain medication like asprin, coldcap, chloropheniramin (piriton) if your discomfort becomes intolerable or if such meds can help you get a good night's rest. But it's best to avoid medications that aim to suppress helpful processes such as fever, coughing, and a runny nose.

It's important to note that just because colds and flus can be helpful to your body doesn't mean that you need to experience them to be at your best. If you take good care of your health and immune system by getting plenty of rest and consistently making health-promoting dietary and lifestyle choices, your cells may stay strong enough to avoid getting infected by viruses that come knocking on their membranes. In this way, you won't have enough weak and extraneous cells to require a cold or the flu to work its way through your body to identify and lyse them.

Curious about how to differentiate the common cold and the flu? Here is an excellent summary of the differences:
A cold usually comes on gradually — over the course of a day or two. Generally, it leaves you feeling tired, sneezing, coughing and plagued by a running nose. You often don't have a fever, but when you do, it's only slightly higher than normal. Colds usually last three to four days, but can hang around for 10 days to two weeks.
Flu, on the other hand, comes on suddenly and hits hard. You will feel weak and tired and you could run a fever as high as 40 C. Your muscles and joints will probably ache, you will feel chilled and could have a severe headache and sore throat. Getting off the couch or out of bed will be a nightmare. The fever may last three to five days, but you could feel weak and tired for two to three weeks.

One more thing to remember: because the common cold and the flu are both caused by viruses, antibiotics are not necessary. People who take antibiotics while suffering with a cold or flu often feel slightly better because antibiotics have a mild anti-inflammatory effect. But this benefit is far outweighed by the negative impact that antibiotics have on friendly bacteria that live throughout your digestive tract. In this light, if you really need help with pain management during a cold or flu, it is usually better to take a small dose of asprin or panadol than it is to take antibiotics.

Please share this basic health information on colds and flus with family and friends; although it isn't readily available from the annals of conventional medicine, this information can save you and your loved ones significant time, money, and anguish.