US$10 doesn't sound like much to me.

US$10 doesn't sound like much to me.

The real problem is with the price of the anti-viral drugs through. Foreign companies charge exorbitant prices for HIV drugs, thus making it harder for poorer countries to treat their HIV-positive population. It would help alot of they do not try to profit from human tragedy.

VietNamNet – Vietnam will receive US$10mil this year to combat HIV/AIDS from the US Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, announced US Global AIDS Coordinator Randall Tobias, who is in Vietnam on a two-day working visit.

Vietnam is one of 15 countries chosen for the $15bil US government programme, which will be implemented over five years.

Mr Tobias is currently in Hanoi to meet with Deputy Prime Minister Pham Gia Khiem, Minister of Healthcare Tran Thi Trung Chien and other Vietnamese heath officials to discuss the details of the funding. He visited Bach Mai Hospital, one of Vietnam’s biggest hospitals, yesterday afternoon.

Mr Tobias said that Vietnamese leaders are important factors in the fighting AIDS program. “I am very encouraged since almost Vietnamese leaders and heath officers all commited that they will execute the plan effectively,” he noted.

Speaking to the press at Bach Mai Hospital, Mr Tobias expressed his optimism that the HIV epidemic could be thwarted in Vietnam.

“We are pursing the ambitious goal to reduce mother-to-child transmission by 40 percent in the severely affected areas over the next five years,” he said.

“The training of 14,700 maternal and child health workers, and capacity building at over 900 healthcare facilities are heartening indications that we can meet that goal,” he added.

Mr Tobias also visited the Voluntary Counseling & Testing Centre (VCT), an HIV/AIDS advisory centre, and spoke with the centre’s leaders.

It was also announced yesterday that $515mil in additional funding will soon be released to fight HIV/AIDS in the 15 focus countries.

Hoang Huong

There's one way for sure to get rid of aids, but I think no one here is gonna like it.

We need "The Final Solution". Make the whole Vietnamese population have a blood test. Those found positive should be exiled to Con Dao (Pescadore Islands) to live there and die there. Problem solved.

Sometimes we need an iron hand to get things done.

One sure way not to get affected by AIDS, is killing oneself. Done.

Deport them to cambodia! lol.

I'm sure there are less extreme ways to prevent AIDS.

How nice of you

I'm sure there are less extreme ways to prevent AIDS.



How nice of you

You can't find every person who has aids.

Some will just bribe the inspectors, and I'm sure there are some government officials who have the disease from doing it with whores, so they might use their power to skip it as well. Are you sure you can find everyone with the disease?

You can't find every person who has aids.

Some will just bribe the inspectors, and I'm sure there are some government officials who have the disease from doing it with whores, so they might use their power to skip it as well. Are you sure you can find everyone with the disease?

9/10 odds that after we "purge" the people with aids, it will come back because some outsider will come in and start spreading it again.

Lets say it costs $10 to screen each person. Probably more.

That would be like 810 million dollars to screen everyone in Vietnam. Also add the costs of what we do to those who we find who have the disease. It's expensive.

OK $810 million and a bullet per person with AIDS. Doesn't sound like alot. I'll donate the bullets. LOL

I'm not sure about the prostitutes though. Most were innocent girls forced into the profession by circumstance and not of their own choosing. 

Perhaps yoga or kamasutra can heal the wounds better than medicines?

Perhaps yoga or kamasutra can heal the wounds better than medicines?

Where there is no hope,

Only Love can heal... Serenity...

Errr....too much kamasutra is one of the reasons that AID is an epidemic around the world.

I thought AIDS can be cured in a way that you live longer than expected.. and I think they're working on the cure because there are people who live with AIDS (they won't die because of AIDS)

I thought AIDS can be cured in a way that you live longer than expected.. and I think they're working on the cure because there are people who live with AIDS (they won't die because of AIDS)

Will there ever be a cure for AIDS ?

what causes the AIDS victims to die, if not AIDS itself? 

in fact I heard there was a way (serious) to cure aids, by just living a serene and brave simple good life in Tibet. I saw that on French TV!

There are people who are immune to the HIV virus so those won't die from AIDS, but they can die from accidents or old age or other reasons.

I think there will be, just need sometime...


There are people who are immune to the HIV virus so those won't die from AIDS, but they can die from accidents or old age or other reasons.

Wow , we definitily need to find and examine these people to find out what their secret is ... --

BERKELEY, California -- It took Adam Arkin and David Schaffer just $200,000 and a grad student to develop a potential treatment for AIDS. And that scares them.

That's because the therapy itself is a virus. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory assistant professors created a virus altered to latch onto HIV and mute its ability to become AIDS. They've tested the theory in a computer model, and in cells in a dish. The results have been promising, and if they continue in that vein, the researchers could begin animal testing by the end of this year.

Arkin said this week at the International Biotech Summit at the University of California at Berkeley that it was almost too easy for him and his colleagues (Schaffer and then-grad student Leor Weinberger) to build the anti-HIV virus.

"If I can do it, anyone can do it," Arkin said. "That's going to be a problem."

Well, maybe not anyone. After all, Arkin, Schaffer and Weinberger, who was lead author on their Journal of Virology paper (reg. required) outlining a mathematic model of the system, are not your run-of-the-mill lab jockeys.

Still, bad guys can be brilliant, too, which is even more reason for the good guys to understand new biotechnologies as thoroughly as possible.

"The genie is out of the bottle, so we might as well study these things in earnest," Arkin said in an interview.

Plus, the potential good could outweigh the bad. By using a computer model of what happens to the immune system when it's infected with HIV, Arkin and his colleagues have designed a potential AIDS treatment that would remain with the patient as long as he or she has HIV, meaning it would prevent AIDS from arising even in patients who otherwise would have developed the disease after a decade of latency. They also predict HIV would not become resistant to the virus.

The treatment is made of a gutted HIV virus. The harmful parts of the virus are removed, and in their place the researchers have inserted a DNA cargo that inhibits HIV's ability to kill immune cells. It latches onto the natural HIV and spreads along with it, even from person to person.

If this process sounds familiar, it's because it is essentially gene therapy, albeit a transmissible gene therapy. But the term "gene therapy" has fallen out of favor because of a handful of fatalities in clinical trials and, after nearly three decades of research, no gene therapy method has been proven to work consistently.

So Arkin and Schaffer are instead calling the process "synthetic biology." Despite appearances, it's not an arbitrary term: The researchers are synthesizing biological elements into machines to do their bidding.

"An artificial virus is one such product, since it is designed and constructed using molecular biology tools for a specific therapeutic application," Schaffer said. "As another example, Jay Keasling in our department engineers bacteria to produce small-molecule pharmaceutical drugs."

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, MIT and other institutions have established departments and courses dedicated to this manipulation of human molecules.

"All the capabilities are found in nature, just not in the right order to do what we want to do," Arkin said. "It's like changing the computer language. (Cells) perform amazing engineering feats under the control of complex cellular networks. We didn't design it, evolution did."

Computer modeling is key to figuring out what bacteria or viruses might do in a given situation. The computer model Arkin and Schaffer used showed that their therapy won't likely eliminate all HIV cells in a patient. But if the treatment inhibits HIV too much, the good virus won't be able to propogate.

"Maximal inhibition actually causes the therapy to extinguish itself," Schaffer said in an e-mail.

Without the computer model to guide them, the researchers may not have detected such subtleties. However, other labs like Virxsys (researchers there published work that gave Arkin et al. a foundation for their own work) are further along in developing a similar therapy (although the Berkeley researchers' method is unique in its piggyback effect) without the benefit of a computer model. Scientists there are already testing their treatment for safety in humans, and hope to test for efficacy by the end of this year, said Boro Dropulic, the company's founder and chief scientific officer.

Arkin and Schaffer's computer model will also help them foresee potential problems, which are plentiful when trying to treat a deadly disease with a manufactured virus. This is a virus that can be spread by having sex, just like HIV (although if it works, that could be a good thing). It's also possible that HIV and the therapeutic virus could mutate around each other and recombine to make an altogether new virus.

"I can't say now it won't make it worse," Arkin said.

you're so cute...