Topical treatment wipes out herpes with RNAi | Hacker News Reader

Topical treatment wipes out herpes with RNAi

harvardscience.harvard.edu

34 pointsrms28 comments

And so began the thread that everyone was a little afraid to post "hooray!" in.

Boffery needs to check in with these folks for possible cross-promotion opportunities...

(Context: I'm the cofounder of a pre-launch site called Boffery, a visual private diary of a user's sex life.)

Everyone tells me that, and everyone is right. There's one service I'd love to partner with if I ever got the chance. Hopefully you'll never need to use this, but inSPOT is getting popular in the Bay Area as a way to discreetly tell people you may have given them an STD: http://www.inspot.org/gateway.aspx

I think 4chan getting admin access to your accounts is going to be even funnier/embarrassing than twitter.

Beware, sometimes your website exists only to serve as a visual warning to others...

Ha, yes, that's a major concern for us. We lucked out and found some very experienced people who've worked with federal financial data. We're assuming major security threats from (before) Day Zero.

One advantage is that all Boffery accounts are private. No one knows you have an account on Boffery unless (1) they email you a friend invitation on the site and (2) you accept. While this only protects against certain forms of attack, it does make us a slightly less inviting target. There is no Barack Obama or Kevin Rose of Boffery until they choose to publicize their accounts elsewhere.

Plus we will not use a dictionary-searchable admin password. Ha.

I'm sure I will waste all my karma this fall asking HN to pick apart our security plans. But for now, I just wonder if choosing sex as the test of this sort of high-security, process-intense visual social network format wasn't just the thing to keep us from scaling TOO fast to keep up with reliability and security.

The most significant line from the article for me: "The World Health Organization estimates that approximately 536 million people worldwide are infected with herpes..."

That's really an astonishing number. From a utilitarian standpoint this finding must be incredibly important.

That number was a surprise on the low side for me, because I've often heard estimates that 25%-30% of adults in the US have HSV-2. Naively scaling that up to worldwide would have suggested up to 2 billion infections.

Except that that figure is quite high when you consider other nation's rates of infection

For example, Australia's rate of HSV-2 is around 12% while the UK is around 10% even though we have fairly similar cultural backgrounds when it comes to sexual activity.

I would expect that rate to be much lower in some middle eastern and asian cultures due to differences in culture regarding sexual activity.

536 million might be on the conservative side, but I would suggest it's nowhere near 2 billion.

Could also be measurement error...

Could be, but its probably also a cultural thing. Most Americans don't view oral sex as sexual contact, and yet, most STIs are transmittable from it. This, alongside sexual education in schools that focuses on that 1% (used correctly) failure rate of condoms and lack of hard scientific evidence it will prevent the spread of HPV, leading them to think "condoms are unreliable, so why bother?" has led to a thriving youth culture of unprotected oral sex...and later, when they become sexually active, unprotected sex.

And it just so happens one of the primary ways women catch HSV-2 is through a partner infecting them orally. There are "virgins" getting herpes in America.

Now, again, culturally, I've been told that Aussie men are incredibly chauvinistic, so maybe a smaller percentage is likely to engage in oral sex. I'm generalizing and speculating here , so take it with a grain of salt. In the UK, the sex education could be better. From talks with my friends from southern states, it seems you'd have to deliberately try to do worse.

Just to add a little elucidation to the sex-ed thing, the places that don't focus on abstinence as the only technique don't really explain the numbers. That's a 1% chance that after a year of regular sexual intercourse. Which makes the per-use numbers much, much smaller.

Furthermore, there was at least some issue in that many doctors were more conservative, and didn't really like talking about oral sex. (I heard this from a doctor who was complaining about this).

I don't doubt the WHO's overall estimate; just pointing out a contrast -- both between regions and in what numbers astonish people.

Since many infected people never display any symptoms, I was too expecting a much larger number of carriers.

I regard eliminating STD's and developing 100% idiot proof contraceptives as quite important. Ideally this would lead to humanity getting over the whole sex thing once and for all and it can be relegated to stuff no one cares about like whether you like mustard or ketchup.

I think developing idiot-only contraceptives would be a major step in the right direction.

you assume evolution = getting better when in fact high intelligence is linked with a lower incidence of childbirth making intelligence a dead end.

Not really. I was a) trying to be funny and b) associating a more intelligent population with a hypothetical improvement on overall life conditions.

Interesting article. Does anyone know if this insight can then lead to curing already infected patients? My understanding is this treatment is a condom, not a cure.

It seems the technique could be used to stop the virus from spreading from cell to cell inside the patient, so, pretty much, it appears very close to a cure.

Hooray for genetic hacking. I really hope they can use similar methods to wipe out cancer cells as well - thought, cancer isn't a virus and there are lots of different cancer cells.

HPV is a cancer caused by the presence of a virus.

Diabetes Type I tends to occur in people that contain a certain blood virus (often they're born with it.) The next time you donate blood, look at your donor card. It'll relate your viral status just like it does your blood type. Apparently, they've discovered that children tend to develop diabetes if they're transfused with blood that contains the virus. (Sorry I can't remember its name. I just know because I asked about my status last time I donated and what it meant, and they explained "Basically, we can use your blood safely with children.")

Keep in mind its not a direct correlation: You might have the virus, but not diabetes. Or vice versa.

And outside of humans, Feline Leukemia is transmitted from close contact (such as fighting or sexual activity).

Hopefully this research, and research like it, will lead to breakthrough that allow us to better target virii and protect ourselves from them. The goal here, aside from eliminating life-impacting diseases such as HIV, HPV, and Herpes, but also eliminating the "common cold".

Finally people will no longer be able to say, "They can put a man on the moon, but they can't cure the common cold...".

Strictly speaking, HPV is a virus which causes cervical cancer (in almost every case), and to a lesser extent other cancers like mouth, anus and penis.

I believe (found a nature paper about) that a virus closely linked with diabetes is Coxsackie.

One of the issues with the common cold is that it mutates fairly quickly, IIRC and there are a lot of them. HPV does not (there is a vaccine for some strains).

Yes, all this is correct. I misspoke. I really should proof read my hacker news comments more. But thank you for correcting me and doing so in a polite manner.

There is a post-delay option on our userpages. I don't currently use it, but it's available to let us WYSIWIG-edit our comments before others see them.

HPV is a cancer caused by the presence of a virus.

HPV (human papillomavirus) is a virus, not a cancer. Most people carry the virus but are asymptomatic. Of the approx 130 types of HPV, some can lead to cancer, most commonly of the cervix.

You're completely correct, my mistake. Thank you for clarifying my point.

Experimental and epidemiological data imply a causative role for viruses and they appear to be the second most important risk factor for cancer development in humans,...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oncovirus

This is brilliant. Things like these are why I love science.

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