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posted by takyon on Wednesday March 06 2019, @09:24PM   Printer-friendly

For just the second time since the global epidemic began, a patient appears to have been cured of infection with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS.

The news comes nearly 12 years to the day after the first patient known to be cured, a feat that researchers have long tried, and failed, to duplicate. The surprise success now confirms that a cure for H.I.V. infection is possible, if difficult, researchers said.

The investigators are to publish their report on Tuesday in the journal Nature and to present some of the details at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Seattle.

Publicly, the scientists are describing the case as a long-term remission. In interviews, most experts are calling it a cure, with the caveat that it is hard to know how to define the word when there are only two known instances.

Both milestones resulted from bone-marrow transplants given to infected patients. But the transplants were intended to treat cancer in the patients, not H.I.V. Bone-marrow transplantation is unlikely to be a realistic treatment option in the near future. Powerful drugs are now available to control H.I.V. infection, while the transplants are risky, with harsh side effects that can last for years. But rearming the body with immune cells similarly modified to resist H.I.V. might well succeed as a practical treatment, experts said.

HIV-1 remission following CCR5Δ32/Δ32 haematopoietic stem-cell transplantation (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1027-4) (DX)


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  • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 06 2019, @09:38PM (10 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 06 2019, @09:38PM (#810877)

    My pastor says he knew as long ago as 1985 that the cure for HIV was to not be homosexual or Haitian.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 06 2019, @10:52PM (7 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 06 2019, @10:52PM (#810906)

    It originated in chimpanzees... The earliest known case of infection with HIV-1 in a human was detected in a blood sample collected in 1959 from a man in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo. (How he became infected is not known.)
    Uh...

    • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 06 2019, @10:55PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 06 2019, @10:55PM (#810909)

      Did this man or his pet chimpanzee travel to Haiti?

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 07 2019, @01:54AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 07 2019, @01:54AM (#810970)

        Why did you fuck and infect his chimpanzee you fucking weirdo!

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 06 2019, @11:34PM (4 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 06 2019, @11:34PM (#810925)

      Nope, now the theory is that it has transferred from monkeys/apes to humans over a dozen times:

      The new research also helps explain a mystery. Scientists have now documented that the SIV virus has jumped from monkeys or apes into humans at least 13 separate times!

      https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/news/081101_hivorigins [berkeley.edu]

      So this virus that is nearly impossible to transmit from person-to-person is being transmitted from other species to humans once every couple years? Also, this:

      "Surprisingly, it does not matter how a woman is exposed to HIV -- vaginally, rectally, etc. -- the virus goes very quickly to the female reproductive tract"

      The more I hear about HIV the odder it gets. First, it is nearly impossible to transmit sexually[1], second most infections appear to start from a single virus,[2] despite the huge genetic diversity of intrapatient HIV that supposedly makes it hard to treat[3]. And now this business about homing to the reproductive tract. This just doesnt sound like a virus... it sounds like an entire cell gets transmitted.

      [1] http://m.jid.oxfordjournals.org/content/191/9/1403.full [oxfordjournals.org]
      [2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/18490657/ [nih.gov]
      [3] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2614444/ [nih.gov]

      https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=12103&cid=302121#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]

      • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday March 07 2019, @04:38PM (3 children)

        by tangomargarine (667) on Thursday March 07 2019, @04:38PM (#811185)

        From a skim of Wikipedia, it sounds like the theory is that people who deal with bushmeat in Africa pretty commonly end up with the monkey version of the disease (SIV), but it needs to be quickly passed from host to host several times in humans before it manages to mutate into HIV. So they think it just became a thing in the 20th century because it took that long for human living arrangements to get to that point, with people living in close enough contact in cities with lots of prostitutes and stuff.

        nearly impossible to transmit from person-to-person

        Low rate of transmission doesn't really matter if a sufficiently large population is exposing themselves to it on a regular basis. Don't most STDs only have a transmission rate of like 10%?

        --
        "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
        • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday March 07 2019, @04:43PM (2 children)

          by tangomargarine (667) on Thursday March 07 2019, @04:43PM (#811191)

          Whoops, forgot the link I was going to use.

          Sexual intercourse is the major mode of HIV transmission.

          link [wikipedia.org]

          Also under "Origins":

          While transmission rates of HIV during vaginal intercourse are typically low, they are increased manyfold if one of the partners suffers from a sexually transmitted infection resulting in genital ulcers. Early 1900s colonial cities were notable due to their high prevalence of prostitution and genital ulcers to the degree that as of 1928 as many as 45% of female residents of eastern Leopoldville were thought to have been prostitutes and as of 1933 around 15% of all residents of the same city were infected by one of the forms of syphilis.[146]

          As an aside, they really didn't make it easy to find in that article. The heck is "tropism", and how many people know that definition? I found it by doing a page search on "transmission."

          --
          "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
          • (Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday March 07 2019, @05:57PM

            by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us (6553) on Thursday March 07 2019, @05:57PM (#811247) Journal

            The heck is "tropism", and how many people know that definition?

            A turning, or what does the subject turn towards? Tropic (turn of axial tilt), trope (turning a phrase), tropism (bacteria/virus turns/prefers what cells?), heliotropic (turn towards the sun), hydrotropic (root turns towards the water). Same root.

            But I love word origins, a logotropist of the first order.

            --
            This sig for rent.
          • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 07 2019, @06:03PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 07 2019, @06:03PM (#811252)

            The HIV article is focused on the virus (virology) while the AIDS article is focused on the disease (epidemiology/physiology).

            Tropism is a virology term that classifies viruses based on the types of cells they can infect (e.g. T-tropic infects T cells, M-tropic infects macrophages, anthro-tripic infects human cells)

            https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=HIV/AIDS&mobileaction=toggle_view_desktop#Transmission [wikipedia.org]

  • (Score: 5, Funny) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday March 06 2019, @10:57PM (1 child)

    by PartTimeZombie (4827) on Wednesday March 06 2019, @10:57PM (#810910)

    Go on admit it, your pastor is Ted. [wikipedia.org]

    Not that I'm judging. If he wants to take drugs and have sex with dudes, that's his business. Plenty of evangelicals do it.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 07 2019, @06:00AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 07 2019, @06:00AM (#811046)

      It's kind of hypocritical still to first bash gays in the public and then take it in the ass in private. And don't even get me started on child molesting.