Festive Roundup: Wikileaks, DADT, Canada's probably selling its water, and other people than me actually like bees

In the spirit of festive days off, I'm lumping all the posting I would normally be doing today into one, easy-to-access/ignore update before I run off to consume heroic volumes of martini with my extended family. Happy Holidays!

Bradley Manning talks about his detention, via proxy friend of his. Unsurprisingly, if he's to be believed, the Pentagon isn't telling the truth!
"But that's impossible!", you may say, if you've been living under a current events rock for the last ten years.

Examples:

The Pentagon says... Manning gets TV time and is not restricted in what he views.
Manning says...except for international TV, and only between 7-8pm when there's no news on. No newspapers allowed. In fact, when it was mentioned to him that the Pentagon said he was allowed the paper, he laughed.

The Pentagon says...he gets outside activity without restraint!
Manning says...he hasn't been outside in four weeks.

The Pentagon says...bedding of "adequate, soft, non-shreddable material".

Manning says...bedding with the weight of a lead x-ray apron and the texture of carpeting that gives him burns at night if he moves, because they take all his clothes from him. Lights on all night so they can watch him. Sure sounds comfy.

The Pentagon says...exercise may include running, calisthenics, basketball, etc.
Manning says...he gets exercise insofar as walking in chains is exercise.

There are some questions about the in/famous Lamo, as someone speculates that the timeline around him turning Manning in doesn't make much sense. I can see it being spurious. I can also imagine circumstances where it's actually quite straightforward and easily explained. As per often, I have no idea.

Despite not being able to do much of anything except sit around and be quietly brutalized, Manning's kind enough to wish everyone a happy holidays, including the guys at Quantico who will be guarding him instead of hanging with their families. Also, dear Santa: I think I want Bradley Manning for christmas.

The US Army is looking into its internal security after the wikileaks....leaks.....just like they did after that guy shot up Fort Hood.

Wikileaks is legitimizing, including actually paying its staff. Rad. Probably still won't be classed as a journalistic organization, despite the overwhelming amount of journalistic functions they serve. Once again, any register of shock and you haven't been reading this blog.


In non-leak-related news:

The most awesome thing to ever happen in the convergence of education and science happened in the UK, when a group of school kids got their paper on bees peer-reviewed and published. They're the youngest ever authors of a peer-reviewed paper. Also, I love them, as this early engagement with science and doing hard things will probably be the first step in them developing cold fusion or something. Bonus: they also like bees, and I tend to like people who can side with the useful underdog.

You might not know this (because I was working, and not here to scream and celebrate about it), but the US Senate voted through the takedown of the Military's Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy, finally putting one tiny, Lady GaGa-protested piece of their operations in line with the constitution. Despite how many decades overdue this is, how much LGBTQ rights have (understandably) been in the media recently, and despite my sass, this is awesome. I can see no reasonable downside to this. I was so excited I went through the work to make myself a celebratory cosmopolitan. On a tuesday. Big news.


And as the scariest piece of news in this update, Rabble.ca reports that the EU and Canada are in the middle of negotiating a trade agreement (CETA) that would put the rights to our fresh water up for privatization and sale. Maude Barlow from the Council of Canadians is angrily calling shenanigans--if this goes through, it would be the first time ever that our drinking water would be fully covered under a trade treaty. Suddenly that novel I'm inevitably writing about the dystopian water wars sounds much less....novel.


Also, for your holiday pleasure, I found this little slice of excellence:

Happy Holidays, I'm off to get mildly drunk.

The Cure for HIV: Nurse Best Friend weighs in with Science

A few days ago I posted this article, with the great excitement that comes from being witness to something incredible and overwhelmingly hopeful.

For all intents and purposes, the human race has managed to cure HIV.

As summoned, Nurse Best Friend Stan rises to the occasion, dropping science and putting this incredible scientific miracle into the context of the pandemic. He's been hard at work doing HIV/AIDS Outreach with Public Health in two wildly different (and painfully similar) countries this year, so I figure he's the best qualified person I know. Also he's generally awesome.
This is what he graciously dropped in my facebook feed:

Here is the skinny on CCR5 receptors and HIV as I know it: 

Stan + Florence Nightengale = <3

The CCR5 receptor is kind of like a cellular appendix which the HIV 1 and 2 viruses attach to in order to gain entry into the CD4 (or white blood cell). HIV 1 and 2 cannot gain entry to the cell in people who have the genetic mutation which causes them not to create these "appendix" receptors, but they can still be infected with HIV. They will be asymptomatic, and probably will not develop AIDS for a very, very, very long time (if at all), but can still infect other people.   

As an example: there is a population of monkeys somewhere in South-central Africa in which there are no CCR5 receptors present and almost all members of this group have SIV (Ed. note: Simian immunideficiency virus--the most simple, crude description would be monkey AIDS). They live and reproduce and throw feces and do things monkeys tend to do--the virus and the monkeys basically live in symbiosis with each other.

Essentially, what they did with "THE BERLIN PATIENT" was replace his bone marrow stem cells (which are responsible for creating CD4 cells) with stem cells which carry the mutation that excludes the CCR5 receptor from the CD4 cellular envelope. Essentially, they wound up replacing his old CD4 cells with the HIV resistant kind.

Cool right? Yeah! 

Unfortunately, there are some huge  reasons why this isn't and won't be a viable option for anyone without a million zillion dollars or a research grant:

1) It's friggin expensive. Run a price check on bone marrow stem cells and let me know if you think there is enough money around to treat 33 million people, 60% of whom live in the most extreme poverty we can muster up on this planet. (Ed note: we're doing entirely too much mustering in this regard.)

2) It was friggin lucky. The sheer fact that they were able to find a bone marrow match is incredible, and the fact that they were lucky enough to find one with this already super-rare mutation is like getting struck by lightning while winning the lottery during a shark attack in Lake Simcoe.

3)It was friggin painful. Barring everything else, bone marrow biopsies and transplants are some of the most painful medical procedures known to modern science, burn debridement being the possible exception. 

4)Prevention is just better. Condoms cost cents to make, and a lifetime supply will cost less than this treatment will ever will. PLUS you get to have sex. Clean needles and education will always cost less than this sort of intense treatment, and be easier to implement, track and modify, and adapt interventions based on the needs of the clients.

I'm not denying that this guy is technically cured--if his ELISA is coming back negative, the antigen and antibody tests are negative, his CD4 count is high and viral load is undetectable (with negative antigen tests), then by all means, declare him cured. Kind of like how they cured that girl with rabies in the West (Ed. note: that was friggin interesting. Click that link). 

However, it doesn't mean that we've beat the disease. I would chalk it up as a lucky one-off that is a great avenue to begin some research. 

Apply this genetic knowledge to new HIV drugs and to the ongoing vaccine research, but it is not transferable, accessible or available to most people living with HIV.

In short: something awesome happened, that opens up further possibilities and avenues of awesome for the future. 

But we've still got a loooong way to go before we're out of the woods with HIV.

Huge thanks to Stan and SCIENCE!!