They're probably not, they're probably just the country in that region of the world that is best at testing and identifying new variants.
Ehh? Wasn't the Brazilian variant "Epsilon", following "Delta" from India? And now it's "Omicron" because they decided to skip the letter "Xi". No joke.
Poor health care, low vaccination rate, and most importantly, a high rate of untreated HIV infections. When a virus can spend large amounts of time inside someone variants are going to happen.
True, but most don't have the crazy high HIV rates as some African countries. It could have originated elsewhere in Africa and SA was the the first to detect it, but I'd bet it originated somewhere on that continent.
Does having an HIV infection up the chances of mutations? Why would that matter? There was one lady I read about that was HIV positive and also tested covid positive for like a month straight but it was some weird one off.
I still think the wildest thing in recent medicine were the two HIV-positive guys who got immune system transplants from HIV-immune donors due to it being a highly risky last-chance treatment for cancer, and ended up cured of HIV as a byproduct.
If you have untreated HIV, your immune system is suppressed. You may still produce antibodies, but at much lower numbers than someone with a healthy immune system. The virus continues to reproduce in said person much longer than normal and because of the constant mutation rate it evolves to escape what few antibodies are being produced. It doesn't up the mutation rate of the virus, it just gives the virus a greater chance to evolve antibody escape and to adopt to it's new host. Then it gets transmitted to someone else and we have a new variant in circulation. When you hear people spreading rumors about vaccines spawning new variants it's nonsense. Newly exposed vaccinated people get rid of the virus at a much faster rate than newly exposed unvaccinated people.
MRNA vaccines are in development to immunize folks against HIV/AIDS. I will bet good, folding money that within a few hours of a major announcement, you'll have anti-vax folks claiming the recipients of the HIV vaccine will get a new form of HIV that they will spread through butt stuff, starting the butt-pocalypse. I can make this bet because I will literally post as Qui-Gon-Jin-N-Juice on some conspiracy boards to this effect. I will also use proceeds from this bet to kick-start my own line of "Butt-pocalypse" swag sold to compliment MAGA hats and "Let's Go Brandon" t-shirts. It makes me sad to think that the two public health crises of my lifetime with ready solutions will be crippled by anti-vax nonsense. From what I can tell, SA is as Aetius said: a regional lead, more capable of identifying a new and distinct variant than most other places in the region, and with enough of a transparent government to allow said information to reach international eyes/ears. Most of the variants that get news attention aren't isolated to a single region/country, and unless a variant has a low likelihood of true positive test and high likelihood of severe symptoms, it won't get recognized as distinct. There are trillions of copies of this virus out there. For a variant to emerge as distinct it has to trigger some recognition. The most likely ways it would trigger recognition as distinct are: it doesn't show up on our tests, slips through our countermeasures or causes aggressive symptoms. If it looks/behaves likes regular covid, but has a weird hat on one side, no one gives a shit. So, as the alphabet soup is circulating, the ones that are really scary are the viral equivalent of Rambo: evade detection, kill everyone, and resist all countermeasures. So, yes, Delta is kind of like fentanyl to COVID's heroin....and the further down the alphabet we go, the more it's like playing Russian Roulette. Seeing new variants emerge should be a cause for concern, not because "ugh pandemic again", but because a new variant emerged from the cacauphony because chances are it's something distinct and worse. There is a certain amount of "yes, this isn't a one-off mutation, this is persistent across multiple cases", but again...documenting that to an extent that we test, examine and recognize a new variant typically happens with some cause for that scrutiny (ie, bunch of false negative tests, vaccinated folks showing up dying, or the like).
That would be a waste of your talent. The big money is in selling supplements that prevent/cure said health crisis. Bonus points for selling a "detox" for the vaccine.
Can anyone explain the mechanism of this to me? The COVID vaccine works because it stimulates the body's immune response to SARS-COV-2, but humans have no immune response to HIV. It's why no one ever naturally cures themselves of it.
Someone else will have to explain the vaccine (I have no idea) but we do mount an immune response to HIV. The damn thing mutates at incredible rates to evade the response. It also has a bunch of other tricks it has evolved to escape immune response which is why developing a vaccine for it has been so hard.
Ignore the previous comment, here's an article that explains how HIV evades immune response. https://www.immunology.org/public-i...-and-disease/human-immunodeficiency-virus-hiv
Articles about MRNA vaccines for HIV. https://www.clinicaltrialsarena.com/news/moderna-hiv-vaccine/ https://www.healthline.com/health-news/to-stop-hiv-researchers-are-investigating-an-mrna-vaccine