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From: hartman@ide.com (Robert Hartman)
Newsgroups: sci.med.aids
Subject: Re: Negative Antibody tests
Message-ID: <38930@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU>
Date: 13 Sep 90 17:12:54 GMT
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[I recieved this by mail from a correspondent who wishes to remain
anonymous, but agreed to let me forward his/her comments to the net -r]

> Subject: Re: Hot Blood
> 
> ...
> Actually, there are plausible mechanism by which heat treatment could
> kill a cell containing an integrated but inactive provirus. In
> principle, the heat treatment (or some drug) could eliminate all
> infected cells and all live virus from a person. Unfortunately,
> the hyperthermia treatment does not seem to be effective after all.
 
I never got this impression from the news clips.  What I got was that there
were several patients that died anyway--but that they were pretty far gone
to begin with.  What I'm wondering is if HT would be more effective with
patients in whom the disease has not progressed very far.

Were there results showing that HT does not kill infected cells?  I never
read about any.  If not, the perhaps it is a potential cure whose value
is not yet accepted because of its unorthodox/botched testing procedures.

(Or maybe it's another case of cold fusion after all.)

-r

ps.  Do infected cells exhibit surface differences that would enable a drug
to bind with them exclusively?  Is anyone pursuing this line of research, and
has there been any progress?  Another idea, but one that sounds expensive:
could it be possible to apply gene therapy to a class of killer macrophages
specifically to target them against cells exhibiting characteristics of HIV
infection (or Herpes, or Hepatitis B, or whatever)?  Of course, if the cells
exhibit no discernable characteristics, this line of attack would fail, but
I can't believe they wouldn't exhibit some subtle differences.