Man in remission from blood cancer and HIV after remarkable treatment

Stem cell transplantation is a standard treatment for several blood cancers, but will almost certainly never be a standard HIV treatment for anyone except patients who need a transplantation anyway, for one single reason: with modern medicine, living with transplanted stem cells is significantly worse than living with HIV.

With modern meds, HIV patients can have a normal life expectancy and live basically normal lives.

You know how in traditional organ transplantation, your own immune cells will attack and often destroy the transplanted organ? In stem cell transplantation, your transplanted immune cells will attack every single organ in your body. Look up "graft versus host disease."

After stem cell donation, most patients will have to take immuno-suppressants that a have significantly worse side effects than modern HIV meds do, often for the rest of their lives - and that's the lucky ones, where the meds will successfully treat the graft versus host disease. One of the more gruesome sights I've seen in my medical career was a lady with a severe graft versus host skin reaction that her doctors couldn't get under control despite massive doses of immuno-suppressants. Eventually large parts of her skin peeled off in strips, like something out of a horror movie. Then she died of pneumonia from the immuno-suppressants.

This is an extreme example, of course, and many people live perfectly ordinary lives after stem cell transplantation, but the failure more is both more likely and more gruesome than the one for antiviral HIV treatment.

- Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Portugal and Ireland do not allow the production of embryonic stem cell lines

- The creation of embryonic stem cell lines is permitted in Finland, Greece, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United Kingdom

- Arkansas, Indiana, Louisiana, North Dakota and South Dakota have passed laws to "prohibit the creation or destruction of human embryos for medical research"

- China has one of the most permissive human embryonic stem cell policies in the world. In the absence of a public controversy, human embryo stem cell research is supported by policies that allow the use of human embryos and therapeutic cloning.

- The Catholic Church opposes human embryonic stem cell research calling it "an absolutely unacceptable act." The Church supports research that involves stem cells from adult tissues and the umbilical cord, as it "involves no harm to human beings at any state of development."

- Islamic scholars generally favor the stance that scientific research and development of stem cells is allowed as long as it benefits society while causing the least amount of harm to the subjects.