One in 10 children has 'Aids defence'
bbc.com
bbc.com
Edit: This article explains: http://www.livescience.com/48015-berlin-patient-hiv-treatmen...
virus returned after a couple of months
Initially after that child – the so-called Mississippi baby – was taken off the drugs, there was no virus detectable in her blood, and her doctor claimed a cure. Unfortunately, after four years the virus returned and she had to restart drug treatment. https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn27112-hivs-hiding-pla...
This was in 2007.
This is one of many reasons why radiation therapy patients are so fragile.
Children have a relatively tolerant immune system, which becomes more aggressive in adulthood - chickenpox, for example, is far more severe in adults due to the way the immune system reacts. "
This is fascinating. It looks like a kid's immune system is in "learning mode" for a while. Which makes sense, gives it time to get exposure to pathogens and compounds.
Assuming HIV isn't cured, then this defense would probably form the basis of eventual widespread resistance to HIV in humans, perhaps centuries from now. But it didn't arise as a response to HIV.
Only for diseases that kill or disable people fast.
Tests showed they had tens of thousands of human immunodeficiency viruses in every millilitre of their blood.
...
Prof Philip Goulder, one of the researchers from the University of Oxford, told the BBC: 'Essentially, their immune system is ignoring the virus as far as possible.'
'Waging war against the virus is in most cases the wrong thing to do.'"
It's possible similar crossovers to SID > AIDS may have happened many times in the past and due to slow travel and worse healthcare the outbreaks just died out. So, some percentage of the population might have relative immunity to similar diseases.
It's also possible for some new mutation to show up that deals with AIDS over time.
Or, they could be all dead before 30 without treatment it's hard to say.
A lot of stuff doesn't have a "single right answer" it seems.
HIV is probably already evolving a bunch of different strains with variying degrees of mortality and morbidity. Those that tend to remain dormant for longer or otherwise fail to kill the host are more likely to spread faster.
If you consider that plus the fact that humans are already begining to develop defenses, you comment could be qualified as: 90% of people who don't have resistence face worse health outcomes, - up to but not necesarily an early demise, - and end up producing fewer offspring.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/academy/journalism/news-style-guide/art...
> However, our style is to use lower case with an initial cap for acronyms, where you would normally pronounce the set of letters as a word (eg Aids, Farc, Eta, Nafta, Nasa, Opec, Apec).
If you look in google news, only the British media uses Aids and Opec. The rest of the world uses capitalised. I'm from the UK, and this is definitely not normal in the UK. It just seems to be some strange (and incorrect IMO) style that the British media has adopted. Their own exceptions (NICE, PC, SAD, UKIP) show the ridiculousness of their policy.
I guess the question is, what is the value of styling "Aids" such? My assumption is that they would say that such acronyms have become words in English, people understand "Aids" or "Nato" as a "thing" and don't even think of it as an acronym (just like "scuba diving" or "laser" or "radar").
If it has basically become a word, it just slows reading down to write it in all caps.
...but I can see it's a debatable issue. This is probably one of those things where some words will become like "laser" and "radar," and some won't. BBC is trying to be on the forefront in guessing which words will be.
The British convention has a clearer mapping between written and spoken language, but leads to ambiguity in the case where there is a name collision between an acronym and the case where there is a collision between an acronym and a common noun and the word occurs in sentence-initial position (or in title case), the latter is also a problem throughout English print usage with proper nouns (instead of acronyms), and the ambiguities that arise in print this way are very nearly a subset of the ambiguities that arise in speech with the same terms. [0]
The non-British usage has worse correspondence between written and spoken language, and leads to ambiguity where there is a collision between an acronym and an initialism, though this is probably rarer. While this may be a less-common situation than the ambiguities produced in the British usage, it is a ambiguity less-closely tied to the inherent ambiguity in speech.
Neither is "incorrect", they are simply different conventions, with different features, and either case the ambiguities produced are usually only theoretical and in practice readily resolved through context.
[0] "Subset" because the speech ambiguities occur indepedently of the conditions that affect casing (initial position in sentence, or title case); "Very nearly" because sometimes terms that are spelled identically and thus would be ambiguous in print are pronounced differently and would be distinct in speech.
If you wouldn't pronounce it, it's not an acronym
In everyday conversation, yeah, they're acronyms.
Unfortunately, "acronym" is widely enough used in the broader sense that includes initialisms that this broader and less-useful definition is a well-documented definition (remember that dictionaries are descriptive of language use, not prescriptive), though its certainly better and facilitates more clear communication to consistently distinguish between "acronyms" in the strict sense (those pronounced as words) and "initialisms" and other abbreviations, rather than using "acronyms" in a broad sense, but because of the conflicting definitions in use one must, until and unless the consistent use of the term renders the broader definition non-current and obsolete, expressly indicate that "acronym" is being used in that narrow sense when so doing, otherwise confusion is likely to ensue.