Hi Horace, Funny, you seemed to manifestly _get_ the point with you solution; perhaps I didn't explain the mechanism clearly enough.
Consider a person who receives the initial infection. They have a tiny cut or opening in the flesh, and infected blood from the diseased person enters their bloodstream. The virus particles will now attempt to penetrate the blood cells of the uninfected host, by slippping through the tiny pores in the cell membrane. If they succeed, the blood cells carry the virus to all parts of the body, and infection occurs. In order to penetrate to the rest of the body the virus must be inside of a blood cell. If the virus fails to initially penetrate the blood cell, it ( like other cellular garbage in the blood stream ) eventually end up excreted from the body. This person is immune from the virus. The virus never has a chance to establish itself in the body. Those who carry the gene for tiny pores never receive the initial infection, hence my suggestion of a vaccine involving gene therapy. But once infected, changing the pore size will not materially effect the progress of the disease. Early on, it was thought that if you could kill all the virus particles in the bloodstream you could eliminate AIDS from the body. Some people were doing this with a dialysis machine and a device to oxygenate the blood. It did indeed reduce the virial load in the bloodstream substantially, but had no effect on the progress of the disease. It's rather like that old saying about allowing the camel to put his nose in your tent. Once the nose is in, the rest of the camel inevitably follows. You've got to konk that nose the moment it appears. K. -----Original Message----- From: Horace Heffner [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, April 10, 2005 1:36 AM To: Vortex Subject: RE: OT: Question regarding condoms At 5:31 PM 4/9/5, Keith Nagel wrote: >Horace writes: >>The cure consists of marrow >>replacement using a doner having blood with small pores. > >Youch! That's a pretty serious procedure just to vaccinate a person. >And that's what you'd get, once the infection occurs it won't help >to transplant the marrow. I guess I am confused. The major problem with AIDS is the attack on the immune system, which is blood born. If the virus can be eliminated from the blood by marrow transplant then why is this not a cure? If the virus is not eliminated from the blood in small pored blood cell individuals, then the small pore marrow transplant would not constitute a vaccination either. Regards, Horace Heffner
