Slashdot Mirror
'Boston Patients' Still HIV Free After Quitting Antiretroviral Meds
ananyo writes "Two men with HIV may have been cured after they received stem-cell transplants to treat the blood cancer lymphoma, their doctors announced today at the International AIDS Society Conference in Kuala Lumpur. One of the men received stem-cell transplants to replace his blood-cell-producing bone marrow about three years ago, and the other five years ago. Their regimens were similar to one used on Timothy Ray Brown, the 'Berlin patient' who has been living HIV-free for six years and is the only adult to have been declared cured of HIV. Last July, doctors announced that the two men — the 'Boston patients' — appeared to be living without detectable levels of HIV in their blood, but they were still taking antiretroviral medications at that time."
The story reports that they have only been off of medication for seven and fifteen weeks and they won't know for a year, but signs are looking positive.
The only real cure we have for this disease.
The Internet King? I wonder if he could provide faster nudity.
The story reports that they have only been off of medication for seven and fifteen weeks and they won't know for a year, but signs are looking positive.
Phrasing >=(
surely, signs are looking negative?
There's a good chance this 'cure' will kill the patent. It works, but it's dangerous. The choice is between a treatment that may kill you now, or a disease that will kill you eventually. And either way you'll get to take lots and lots of drugs with nasty side effects.
From an historical perspective: Covered wagon travel has become quite inexpensive, and costs a few bucks for a team of oxen, so it's not surprising to see a more expensive means of travel appear. A steam locomotive is a cash cow, with related costs adding up $15-30 USD.
Of course stem cell transplants are expensive now, but having a clear road ahead for AIDS treatment opens the door to future optimization and improvement. As the technique matures, it will become routine enough that the cutting-edge treatments you read about on Slashdot will indeed continue to be expensive replacements for current technologies, and those technologies will themselves become cheaper as they mature. Of course, as the cures mature and become part of every doctor's toolbox, the general public, including yourself, will cease to pay any attention to their dropping costs or minor improvements.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Appears to come from modifying adult blood-forming stem cells. Adult stem cells have little to no controversy.
if (it != oneThing) it = another;
Though they mostly were before, HIV transmission through that route is still not that bad. Now, IV drug use, that is where it spreads like wildfire. In fact, there is some speculation that bad drug policy which drove people to IV drugs and then to share needles that actually caused the first wave of the AIDS epidemic.
http://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_pisani_sex_drugs_and_hiv_let_s_get_rational_1.html
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
A patient of chemo for cancer will take many thousands of dollars each year to combat their disease, so this is where cancer treatment seems to have stalled out in the US.
Or maybe it's because treating cancer is insanely fucking difficult, because it isn't actually one disease but hundreds or thousands of different cellular regulation disorders which simply happen to have broadly similar effects, because really weeding out every last tumor cell would require therapies so drastic that they'd be likely to kill the patient, and because many cancers tend to evolve drug resistance over time. The costs of cancer go way beyond prescriptions for a few name-brand drugs (which aren't even available for everything); they include older therapies, hospitalization, and surgery. Insurance companies would save multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars per patient if there was a magic drug that cured cancer, and would happily pay a large amount for such a drug, so it's not like there's no profit to be had.
The cures for pandemics have never been a product of corporate research... They are always the product of government funded or subsidized research.
Yes, the thing that comes to mind is: Would a doctor encourage abortion more if they can harvest embryonic stems cells... or would they fertilize eggs and have them grow in the lab to be harvested later. If you view life beginning at conception (which many people do, not just Christians), this would be a huge ethically questionable act.
if (it != oneThing) it = another;