
Topical treatment wipes out herpes with RNAi - rms
http://www.harvardscience.harvard.edu/medicine-health/articles/topical-treatment-wipes-out-herpes-with-rnai
======
TooMuchNick
And so began the thread that everyone was a little afraid to post "hooray!"
in.

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

~~~
TooMuchNick
(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>

~~~
redrobot5050
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...

~~~
TooMuchNick
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.

------
lunchbox
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.

~~~
gojomo
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.

~~~
froo
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.

~~~
mmmurf
Could also be measurement error...

~~~
redrobot5050
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.

~~~
likpok
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).

------
nazgulnarsil
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.

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

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

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

------
jimgo
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.

~~~
rbanffy
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.

------
amix
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.

~~~
redrobot5050
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...".

~~~
likpok
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).

~~~
redrobot5050
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.

~~~
gravitycop
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.

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

