Hi Jenny, Good information, thank you for the investigation. If you have further contact, could you ask about the risks of using steroids? Since you already have contact, it's probably better if you could ask rather than the man being bombarded with emails from the rest of us :-)
My vets try to avoid steroid use on my FeLV/FIV positive cats (unless absolutely necessary) because of further suppression of the immunosystem and the subsequent risk of being unable to fight off a secondary disease. It seems this protocol would create a constant risk of the patient being even more vulnerable to secondary diseases. I'm concerned this might work really well in a sterile environment, for a couple months, but prove impractical in the "real world". Any insights Dr. Van Dyke could provide would be appreciated. Thanks, Terry ---- "jbero tds.net" <jb...@tds.net> wrote: ============= I just wanted to update you all where I'm at now. I got an email from Dr. Van Dyke, the biochemist involved in this treatment plan. To set a few things straight - he was doing research to find a cure for HIV/AIDS and using cats as an animal model. The intermixed use of FIV/HIV/Felv was in part because of the knowledge at the time concerning the believed similarities of HIV and FIV and in part simply to say that hopefully HIV would behave similarily to FIV and that his work on cats could be carried over to people. Probably not entirely accurate. With respect to the patent being abandoned, it was but he sent me the number of different patent - #6514955. Finally - and I will ask him about this - the paper describes latently infected cats (this by definition means integrated into the host DNA) - but I will clarify this with him. Apparently, what this does is use antioxidants and steroids in combination to suppress the production of virus. It does not 'cure' anyone in that the viral DNA is still within the cat cells, but they are not able to multiple and thereby infect other cells. This, by the way, is the essence of HAART therapy currently used to treat HIV (the difference is that the drugs used now directly inhibit viral activity, in Van Dyke's approach,it is an attempt to get the body to do it for you). The value of this is that if the virus cannot replicate, it cannot mutate (the mutated form of felv is the one that is thought to cause the hematologic diseases and it not contagious; i.e. the virus must mutate within the cat in order to cause these problems). The downside is that the treatment is lifelong. I will ask him for more information and keep you updated. Hope this helps. Jenny _______________________________________________ Felvtalk mailing list Felvtalk@felineleukemia.org http://felineleukemia.org/mailman/listinfo/felvtalk_felineleukemia.org _______________________________________________ Felvtalk mailing list Felvtalk@felineleukemia.org http://felineleukemia.org/mailman/listinfo/felvtalk_felineleukemia.org
