(no subject)

[kengr]

"Majengo is the main battleground and a woman called Agatha is on the front
line. Her life is sordid beyond imagination. A prostitute who works out of one
of Majengo's tin shacks, smaller than a double bed, she makes an unlikely
medical heroine. Agatha is 52 and a grandmother, but still has sex - when she
is lucky, she says - with 40 clients a day. What makes her even more remarkable
is that, in tests systematically conducted over two decades, she has never
tested positive for HIV."

"She is one of a group of 50 prostitutes from Majengo who have demonstrated a
miraculous resistance to an illness that has decimated their clients and killed
off 95 per cent of the female competition. Studied by researchers from the
University of Nairobi and the University of Oxford, they were all found to have
an inordinate quantity of white blood cells perfectly honed to kill
HIV-infected cells. The information obtained from the women has been converted
in laboratories at Nairobi University's Faculty of Medicine into a trial
vaccine. The first tests on humans began this year. No other project in the
world is more advanced or offers more hope that the holy grail, a lasting
solution to Aids, may be found."

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1091353,00.html

Comments

[aurictech.livejournal.com]

If this vaccine works, I want to send this woman a good-sized chunk of change, just for providing a key to the breakthrough*. I really want to see a solution to the AIDS crisis. Besides all the obvious (self-interest and altruistic) reasons, as a soldier, I have one more reason to want AIDS stopped: I'd rather not have to deal militarily with the chaos that could well result from the projected impact of AIDS on the nuclear-armed nations of Russia, China and India that this article [preview only; full article available for purchase online] predicts. To summarize from the original article (as I posted about a year ago): "Even under the most optimistic projections, China, India and Russia alone can expect over 40 million AIDS deaths between now and 2025."

You can see why, as a soldier, I'd rather not have three nuclear-armed nations experience this kind of plague die-off....

*(Hey, what I could afford to send, while not insignificant, would likely have much more impact on Agatha's annual income than on the annual income of any of the researchers....)

[kengr]

Hey, China wouldn't *notice* 40 million. They *want* a population decline.

India might not mind as long as the "right" people die.

Russia could be a problem. Then again, who are they going to fire the nukes at? And why?