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German Doctor Cures an HIV Patient With a Bone Marrow Transplant
reporter writes "HIV is the virus that causes Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). Until now, HIV has no cure and has led to the deaths of over 25 million people. However, a possible cure has appeared. Dr. Gero Hutter, a brilliant physician in Germany, replaced the bone marrow of an HIV patient with the bone marrow of a donor who has natural immunity to HIV. The new bone marrow in the patient then produced immune-system cells that are immune to HIV. Being unable to hijack any immune cell, the HIV has simply disappeared. The patient has been free of HIV for about 2 years. Some physicians at UCLA have developed a similar therapy and plan to commercialize it."
The advantage of this method is that, since the stem cells are coming from your own body, there is no graft vs host disease (which is essentially like standard organ rejection, but instead the organ rejected is your entire body being rejected by the graft... you can imagine that this is very bad). Of course, you still have the problem of developing leukemia later from the total body irradiation and viral integration into an important gene. You also have a high risk of death upfront when you spend several weeks without a functional immune system when the transplant is taking. But nevertheless, it's exciting.
IIRC i watched a TV doc about HIV immunity and how it was found. there is a link to the black death here too.
AS it was discovered that the very same genes that help immunity from the black death are same for HIV.
if you have none of this gene pair "switched on" then you are gonna get ill quick and die......
if you have one of the pair on then you will go on for a few weeks THEN come down with symptoms.
However with BOTH genes switched on you are immune but carry the black death/HIV virus. Was on the discovery channel....
It was also apparently found that is was only ethnic Europeans who had this gene switched on... this led to some conspiracy theories about HIV/AIDS being created to be targeted at non whites.
NEVER let it be said that a late night spliff to chill out whilst Discovery is on is a waste of your chill time!
I have had a bone marrow transplant. No radiation, minimal chemo-like drugs. In the hospital a week or a week and a half, 6 months of outpatient monitoring and I was cured.
For the AIDS treatment to work, they would most likely use something closer to my transplant protocol than the full oblation that they use with cancer patients.
Note to those interested: They dont have to go in with needles or drills to "dig out" the bone marrow from the donor. They give you a drug call the "G" that causes your bone marrow to percolate into your bloodstream. Then they filter it out with a dialysis-type procedure. Its fairly painless. I had it done to save my own marrow in case something went wrong with the transplant.
or you could do a little research yourself before running your mouth off.
in the U.S. there are also conscience clauses in several states that allow pharmacists to refuse to fill a patent's prescription based on religious grounds. this was primarily introduced to to deny women emergency contraceptive pills, but it also opens the door for denying patients other types of medical treatment based on religious prejudices.