Dearest Azureizs,


Atleast you're helping, but I want to leave you with a thought. Say you had a child who made one bad choice and ended up with Aids. Would you not want a cure for that child as well. Would That child not still be innocent? I mean they didn't ask for this deadly sentance for one bad misjudgement.

Is WCG going to run any virtual screening/molecule screening projects after FA@H. Are we going to search for inhibitors for other diseases such as cancer, diabetes etc.

That's why I'm here, to crunch for the innocent. The high-risk behavior types will benefit too and that's fine, but they are not why I am here.

People forget that AIDS actually can indirectly affect all of us. Dangerous diseases such as tuberculosis thrive in people with weakened immune systems and this lets them evolve faster into strains, which are drug resistant. I think there have been some cases now where the 4 known treatments for tuberculosis no longer work. In fact, all diseases are evolving all the time, and eventually find ways to evade the latest attacks on them. It is an endless race. Plants have, for example, been evolving to incorporate toxins, which keep other bugs and beings from eating them. In turn, the bugs and beings evolve defenses against these toxins.

Azureizs,

Thank you for standing up and replying. I respect you for that and for beginning work on the FA@H project.

Unfortunately even in this day and age, education surrounding HIV/AIDS is sadly lacking even in some areas of the western world, and therefore the blanket idea of "risky" lifestyles is a grey area... I'm not saying that ignorance is an excuse all the time: in developed countries the information is out there if people care to look, and certainly some people will and do put themselves at risk knowingly.

But consider this: the vast majority of the innocent infectees (unborn babies infected in the womb, blood transfusion patients like myself, needle stick injury patients, rape victims etc) would not have been exposed to the virus if it was not so prevalent within the population, a population of infected people made up predominantly of people who made bad a judgement, perhaps only once, perhaps more than once, and got unlucky, or, more commonly, those who just didn't and couldn't know any better. Are those people any less innocent than myself? A baby is born HIV+ every few seconds in Africa, because no-one told its mother about the risks of HIV, or she was raped, or she was born that way herself, or all of those things, and because there was no-one there to turn to who could give her the necessary drugs and tell her that, if she's careful, the risk of parental transmission can be reduced to just 2%.

By curing the world, we stop all innocent people from being infected now and in the future. Do it for everyone.

On another topic, it would be great to think that the FA@H project could be extended once the Protease Inhibitor crunching has finished... other medications work on other enzymes such as Reverse Transcriptase, and some work by blocking the virus from latching onto the cells themselves (fusion inhibitors). There is so much left to do within this field, and I know the Grid can do, and is already doing, so much good.

Thank you everyone, from the bottom of my heart, for taking part in this. It means a lot to me personally for so many reasons.