60-year-old German man likely seventh person to be effectively cured from HIV
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Re: 60-year-old German man likely seventh person to be effectively cured from HIV
#2[deleted]
Re: 60-year-old German man likely seventh person to be effectively cured from HIV
#3A 10% risk of death of a massive gamble compared to the alternatives. I can only hope this leads to a more useful solution than immune system replacement. I expect many would prefer a life of daily medication, or even shots every few months, which looks to be a promising form of treatment.
Re: 60-year-old German man likely seventh person to be effectively cured from HIV
#4Too bad it's so drastic. There's also a huge problem with autoimmune disorders, and it would be great to reboot them. Unfortunately you basically have to be near dead from leukemia before this procedure is reasonable.
Re: 60-year-old German man likely seventh person to be effectively cured from HIV
#5A 10% risk of death of a massive gamble compared to the alternatives. I can only hope this leads to a more useful solution than immune system replacement. I expect many would prefer a life of daily medication, or even shots every few months, which looks to be a promising form of treatment.
In this case there are no alternatives, because the patients have leukemia as well as HIV.
For most people the current regimens for treating HIV are excellent. They can get the viral load down to undetectable levels, which makes it impossible to transmit. And the side effects are minimal.
Re: 60-year-old German man likely seventh person to be effectively cured from HIV
#6I wonder if they can evolve this into an autologous stem cell transplant: take a patient's own bone marrow sample, do the genetic mutation, and insert it back? It avoids the graft-versus-host issues of using stem cells from another person, so it should be reasonably safe (though still a major procedure)
Re: 60-year-old German man likely seventh person to be effectively cured from HIV
#7A 10% risk of death of a massive gamble compared to the alternatives. I can only hope this leads to a more useful solution than immune system replacement. I expect many would prefer a life of daily medication, or even shots every few months, which looks to be a promising form of treatment.
In this case there are no alternatives, because the patients have leukemia as well as HIV. For most people the current regimens for treating HIV are excellent. They can get the viral load down to undetectable levels, which makes it impossible to transmit. And the side effects are minimal.
Are undetectable levels really impossible to transmit?
Re: 60-year-old German man likely seventh person to be effectively cured from HIV
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
In this case there are no alternatives, because the patients have leukemia as well as HIV. For most people the current regimens for treating HIV are excellent. They can get the viral load down to undetectable levels, which makes it impossible to transmit. And the side effects are minimal.
Are undetectable levels really impossible to transmit?
As I understand it, large studies of couples where one partner has HIV with an undetectable viral load and the other does not have HIV have not recorded any cases of transmission through sexual activity. The question of whether it's "impossible" or "extremely unlikely" comes down more to philosophy than anything pragmatic at this point.
Transmission through sharing needles we have less confidence around, because illegal drug use is harder to study.
IIRC not everyone reaches an undetectable viral load through antiretroviral medication, so you do need to make sure that's the case. Pre-exposure prophylaxis and general safe sex practices like condoms can mitigate the risk for people with low-but-detectable viral load and their partners.
Re: 60-year-old German man likely seventh person to be effectively cured from HIV
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are undetectable levels really impossible to transmit?
As I understand it, large studies of couples where one partner has HIV with an undetectable viral load and the other does not have HIV have not recorded any cases of transmission through sexual activity. The question of whether it's "impossible" or "extremely unlikely" comes down more to philosophy than anything pragmatic at this point. Transmission through sharing needles we have less confidence around, because ille…
I grew up in the 1990s with an overwhelming fear of HIV as a teenager. It still feels incredible that the virus is now undetectable and non-transmissible with medication that’s not much of a burden in one’s daily life. A cure for AIDS was much closer than anyone imagined in 1993.
When everything seems dark and hopeless, this is one of the examples that always lifts my spirits. Humankind can achieve incredible things together.
Re: 60-year-old German man likely seventh person to be effectively cured from HIV
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
In this case there are no alternatives, because the patients have leukemia as well as HIV. For most people the current regimens for treating HIV are excellent. They can get the viral load down to undetectable levels, which makes it impossible to transmit. And the side effects are minimal.
Are undetectable levels really impossible to transmit?
My "pragmatic" analysis:
I once spoke to a primary-care doctor about the risks of getting HIV through sex. The doctor told me that the risk of getting HIV the "typical way" (receiving anal sex) is about 1/72. Thus, for every 72 exposures, the recipient would contract HIV one time. This assumes that condoms are not used, and that the transmitter has an untreated HIV infection, which presumably has a high viral load.
Transmission risk goes down by orders of magnitude for other forms of sex, until we get to receiving blowjobs, where the risk is literally nil. There are zero recorded cases of HIV caused by receiving a blowjob.
In other words, HIV is actually kind of hard to get. You have to be very active, and not using protection, in order to get it. Or just be very, very unlucky. And that's with respect to untreated cases, which likely have high viral loads.
This suggests to me that, for practical purposes, undetectable levels are impossible to transmit. Or as the Prep marketing executives would say, "U means U" - undetectable means untransmittable.
Whether or not you're comfortable having sex with someone who is HIV+ but claims to have an undetectable viral load is a separate question entirely.