As in, cured?
years ago (10+) I remember hearing about a guy who was totally cured by some process like having all his blood passed through some radiation chamber then back to him. After the procedure he tested free of aids but died about 2-3 months later of cancer or some other effect of radiation.
I doubt that irradiating, or even completely replacing all someone’s blood would do it. HIV is a retrovirus, it makes itself a permanent part of the DNA of any cell it infects. The only way to actually completely remove it would be to find and kill every infected cell in the body.
some people are immune and can’t get HIV, but that’s not the same as cured. Some people live a very long time (15+years) thats a cure of sorts. Liver cancer will kill you in about 6 months, so there are worse things that can happen.
So there are no cases of someone’s body fighting off the infection?
I’ve heard that there have been a few babies born to HIV-positive mothers who tested positive at birth, and then negative some time later. They never developed the virus leading to the conclusion that they fought it and won, but I don’t have any cites for it. I can’t even recall where I read it, just that I was fascinated with the idea. I would be interested to know more if anyone out there can help?
It is impossible to be cured of HIV.
It is a retrovirus, just like Herpes, and you cannot, and I mean -never- be free of a retrovirus. As you know, a virus works by injecting its DNA (well RNA, but that is just details…) into one of your cells, turning that cell into a virus factory until the cell burns out and dies, releasing gazillions of new viruses to infect other cells.
Retroviruses are a bit different. They infect the cell, and nothing necessarily happens. That cell becomes a time bomb waiting for something (usually stress with most retroviruses) to set it off. In the meantime the cell goes on its regular business reproducing and what-not. This is why people have Herpes outbreaks, they might not have had one virus in their bodies, but something caused they to start producing more leading to the sores (this is also why you are at greatest risk of infecting someone else during an outbreak, there was nothing to infect them with the rest of the time.)It does not matter if you do not have a single HIV virus anywhere in your body, and have not for decades; You are still infected. Imagine if a virus were “programmed” so that only every thousandth virus actually caused an infected cell to produce new viruses and to ignore previously infected cells, it would not be long for every cell in your body, every strand of DNA in you, to be reprogrammed. To harness this power is currently the “Holy Grail” of genetic engineering (they are capable of doing it to a small extent).
So unless someone comes up with a way to change the DNA in every cell in your body, not missing a single one, you cannot be cured. (PS, retroviruses do not usually effect every type of cell, but that is really of small comfort)
Currently, scientists are not looking for a cure to AIDS. I don’t think they ever where. They are searching for a way to make it so that having it does not matter, so that you will stop producing new HIV viruses. But even if they succeed, you will not be cured, it simply will not affect you or anyone else until the day when the last infected person dies and there is no longer any HIV around to hurt anyone.
I found this. It seems to be telling the story I remember reading.
I don’t know about cured, but I know I have read of cases where people who had been testing positive began testing negative. And I believe I remember reading of a whole group of people in Australia who have tested positive since the early '80s who have not begun AIDS.
This question will best be answered when JillGat finds it.
What a time for the server to lose my post.
There was a British TV programme about 12-18 months ago (one of “The Cutting Edge” episodes) dealing with the issue of people who are apparently immune to HIV and those who are non-progressors. It was shown on SBS (our multi-cultural channel) here - perhaps a Brit could help us locate a transcript.
From what I recall, those who were either immune or didn’t progress had enzymes/proteins lacking in certain cells in their bodies, so HIV couldn’t penetrate their immunological barriers sufficiently to infect them.
IIRC, the “deficiencies” which allowed these people to “beat” HIV, have so far not been shown to be detrimental in any other respect (one disease “trumping” another is already known - it happens with malaria/sickle cell anaemia all the time).
The neonatal antibody thing is something which has been known for well over ten years now - the fact that a child tests HIV positive at birth means nothing whatsoever if the only test done was an antibody test. Babies routinely show the antibodies of their mothers for several months after birth, and there are much better ways to test for the presence of HIV these days than either of the two main antibody screening tests.
We’ve had the capability to test for the P24 antigen for at least the last 10 years, and our ability to test for viral load has been around for almost as long. These are still fairly “crude” markers, but they’re a hell of a lot more accurate than the antibody tests previously employed.
The early tests were very crude, and there were a lot of “false positives” (most notably among women, for some reason women who’d given birth to more than one child had a tendency to throw positives on the early Western Blots). This is not unknown - half of the people of my generation would throw positive on a Mantoux skin test for TB, even though they aren’t infected.
Screening tests are exactly that - they just screen you. As you go through each level of testing, the testing gets mroe refined and more specific.
The fact that someone threw an HIV positive test in the 80s doesn’t necessarily mean they even had HIV, let alone AIDS (which is actually defined by AIDS-defining illnesses PLUS path results).
Sorry Jill, but my ex-SO and the father of my children died of HIV/AIDS - he’d weep right now if he knew that for all his efforts people are just as ignorant about the realities now as they were almost 20 years ago.
I’m not sure that this answers your question, but there is in fact a mutation which seems to render people immune from HIV/AIDS. It was discovered in a high risk population of prostitutes. The gene encodes for a receptor (CCR5) involved in the movement of immune cells. As luck would have it, the receptor is also used as a coreceptor for entry of the HIV virus into the CD4+ T cells (CD4 being the primary receptor of entry). People with mutated CCR5 are immune, as the virus is not capable of entering the T cell.
[bio nitpick]Herpes is a DNA virus, not a retrovirus[/bio nitpick]
Carry on.
I found a couple of useful links.
Prostitutes lose HIV immunity.
A genetic mutation of the CMKBR5 is thought to offer protection against HIV-1 infection.
Thanks cazzle, I was thinking I remembered hearing that same story.