05 Mar TAB: Good News On the AIDS Front
The 2019 Telluride AIDS Benefit may over and done and looking over its shoulder at another successful year raising funds for its 8 beneficiaries, but the need to “Fight. Fund. Educate” is not. The decades-long HIV epidemic still persists in the United States and worldwide, with nearly 39,000 new diagnoses in the country in 2017. About 37 million people worldwide currently have HIV, and the AIDS virus has killed about 35 million since taking off in the 1980s.
However there appears to be new hope even beyond Truvada.
According to recent and very exciting news stories, this account appeared in the Huff Post, two men now have been cleared of HIV. The so-called “London patient” case gives doctors hope that they might soon find a cure for AIDS.
Read on for more.
Doctors said a London man with HIV has become the second known adult in the world to be apparently cleared of the infection since the global epidemic began decades ago, giving hope for a potential cure for AIDS.
Doctors said that recent tests showed no trace of the man’s previous HIV infection. The milestone came about three years after the man received bone marrow stem cells from an HIV-resistant donor and about a year and a half after coming off antiretroviral drugs. The patient was receiving the bone marrow transplant for cancer.
The case offers hope that researchers will soon find a cure for AIDS. But doctors cautioned against calling the patient’s results a cure for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
Ravindra Gupta, an HIV biologist who helped treat the man, told Reuters that his patient is “in remission” but warned that it’s “too early to say he’s cured.”
The man has chosen to remain anonymous, with scientists referring to him as “the London patient.” The title is similar to the first known case of a cured HIV-positive patient. Timothy Brown, an American man, was known as “the Berlin patient” when he also received a bone marrow transplant for leukemia treatment in Germany 12 years ago. That transplant also appeared to clear his HIV infection…
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