"... when a new influenza virus appears against which the human population has no immunity, resulting in several, simultaneous epidemics worldwide with enormous numbers of deaths and illness."Then, in 2009, the WHO removed the severity and high mortality criteria ("enormous numbers of deaths and illness"), leaving the definition of a pandemic as "a worldwide epidemic of a disease."
Extraordinary breakthrough research has indicated that a small group of HIV-infected people, dubbed "elite controllers," have the power to rid themselves of the virus without any medical help.
Numerous previous studies, carried out over the course of several years, had found that a very small number of the 38 million people infected with the dreaded virus were able to suppress it without any treatment.
The remarkable new finding has found that an even smaller subset of "elite controllers" appear to be able to eliminate HIV from their bodies entirely without taking medicine at all.
The discovery is astonishing because HIV is a lifelong condition for which there is no medical cure. In the vast majority of cases, sufferers require daily antiretroviral therapy (ART) to control the virus and stop the development of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS).
"What happens with these individuals, whom we call elite controllers, may shed light on a HIV-1 cure and also help us understand how a person with HIV might control virus and avoid HIV-associated comorbidities," explained veteran HIV researcher, Keith Hoots, who is the director of the Division of Blood Diseases and Resources at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.
In the new study, experts from Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology studied more than 1,500 elite controllers. Their research discovered that these people achieved virus elimination results which had previously only been seen following years of intensive medical treatment.
The authors say that elite controllers are the closest thing to a possible "natural cure" for the virus, which has claimed more than 33 million lives since the epidemic emerged in the early 1980s.
"A situation where this assumption may be violated is the presence of viral interference, where vaccinated individuals may be more likely to be infected by alternative pathogens."Amanuensis then compares results between the two different statistical approaches in a Qatari study to explore whether violation of this assumption is a realistic possibility and concludes that the multi-variate logistic regression found in their appendix supports the idea that viral interference can start happening a few months after initial vaccination.
-Chua et al, Epidemiology, 2020
"Authorization is being requested for a modified formulation of the Pfizer‑BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine. Each dose of this formulation contains 10 μg of a nucleoside-modified messenger RNA (mRNA) encoding the viral spike (S) glycoprotein of SARS-CoV-2 that is formulated in lipid particles and supplied as a frozen suspension in multiple dose vials."
"To provide a vaccine with an improved stability profile, the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine for use in children 5-11 years of age uses tromethamine (Tris) buffer instead of the phosphatebuffered saline (PBS) as used in the previous formulation and excludes sodium chloride and potassium chloride".
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