Yogurt + AIDS = Health?

OK, but I made you look, right. Actually, the theory is the same, as Wired News explains. A researcher at UI Chicago has taken a different approach in the search for a cure to AIDS than most before. Lin Tao led a team of researchers on a quest for a bacterium that would glom onto AIDS, surrounding it and feeding off of it, preventing, in the process, the spread of the disease.

Apparently, Tao team isolated a couple strains of bacteria that munch on the specific sugar that surrounds HIV. Because these strains of lactobacilli are hungry and have a habit of noshing on a sugar known as mannose, when they are in the human body, they surround HIV, making it impossible for the virus to spread, starving it, effectively, as they stuff themselves.

What's cool about this, aside of the brilliant news that, if it works in humans, it has the potential to cure HIV, is that it's cheap. Merck, Pfizer, and friends may well have to eat huge losses on this one because our bodies already make this stuff, albeit in quantities to small to be very effective. Grab a few samples, grow it, get it into a subject, and BOOM! starving HIV. Let's hope it works. Now we just have to work out what success means for Social Security.