ineffabelle | (no subject)

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As far as I can tell, if you could sustain a high enough fever long enough, it should kill any and all viral infections in your body.
So if we could develop a way to protect the brain, heart and lungs and induce, say, a 108-110 fever over 12 hours, that should be a "cure" for almost every viral ailment.

If someone with more medical knowledge than I knows of a good objection to this, please comment.

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during our complex/long-term semester we had a presentation from an AIDS nurse and couple of people who had been living with that virus for 10+ years or so. One of them was extremely proactive about traveling around and trying experimental treatments, one of them was "extra-corporeal hyperthermia", which involved removing the blood, heating it up (I forget how much, like 120F or something like that), and then allowing it to cool before returning it to the body. It didn't work.

ahh ok.

Well, I'd be curious to know if they did blood tests before returning the blood, because HIV hides out in a bunch of places other than blood.

right, i think that was the problem (no idea how many years ago this was, but here's an article referencing this in 97: http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=2062882)). I think you'd run into the same problem if you heated the entire body up but "protected" certain parts of the body from heat. Wouldn't the viral particles just hide out there? If you could devise some process to protect all the different integral proteins in our body, how could you selectively apply it to all of those and not infectious proteins?

Im no MD-PhD but I think artificial leukocytes might be the way to go. Maybe code little antennae arrays into the proteins and send 'em messages over bluetooth.

that makes sense
maybe an anti-virus that attacks the virus you're trying to get rid of... but going in that direction can be VERY dangerous, because of mutations.

Or a genetically engineered amoeba that feeds only on the virus you want to get rid of. Amoeba are notoriously resilient.

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