HIV // Current

Problems worldwide for HIV-positive travelers

Winnie Sseruma was invited to speak about being HIV-positive at the United Nations in New York last June. While preparing for her... more

nazbags
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POZ - Web Exclusives : HIV Prevention Gets “Fergalicious” - by James Wortman

WE NEED OUR FERGIES ON THE FRONT LINES

sickinjersey
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Warning over Leicester clubber with HIV

Officials have said that a man with HIV may have put many women at risk because he had unprotected sex with a number of partners.... more

ClareW
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Doctors say marrow transplant may have cured AIDS

Pick # 4 for Friday is insane - Cured? You've got to be sh*tting me!!

DailyMenendez
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Claims of HIV Cure by BMT Greeted With Caution

Specialists are cautiously appraising reports that a bone marrow transplant - with specially selected donor stem cells -- appears to have cured a 42-year-old American man of HIV.

Some 20 months after the transplant, there is no sign of HIV in his system, according to Gero Hütter, M.D., and colleagues at the Charité-Medical University here.

"We waited every day for a bad reading," Dr. Hütter told reporters this week, some eight months after he first reported the case, in February at the 2008 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections.

But so far, he and colleagues have been unable to find the virus in blood, bone marrow, lymph nodes, intestines, or brain, he said.

The bone marrow transplant was not intended as a cure for HIV but as treatment for an unrelated acute myeloid leukemia, said Dr. Hütter, a hematologist at the hospital.

But, knowing that people whose immune cells have a defective CCR5 receptor are protected against the virus, he deliberately sought a donor with such a mutation.

People with two copies of the CCR5 mutation, dubbed delta32, are relatively rare -- only about one in 100 people in Central Europe, Dr. Hütter said in February.

Among the 232 HLA-matched donors found by the German Central Bone Marrow Donor Registry, the researchers found one with the double CCR5 mutation.

The transplant itself was without incident, the researchers said, with standard regimens to prevent graft-versus-host disease, and engraftment was achieved by day 13.

"The patient managed transplantation and engraftment without any remarkable irregularities," the researchers said.

The man's HIV treatment was stopped from the day of transplantation and has not been resumed. His immune cells were completely converted to the new CCR5 pattern by day 60 and there was no sign of HIV RNA or proviral DNA after day 68.

But specialists -- and even Dr. Hütter -- are cautioning that a bone marrow transplant is too dangerous and too expensive to be considered as a routine treatment for HIV.

Dr. Hütter told reporters that bone marrow transplants kill around a third of patients and are so dangerous "that they can't be justified ethically" except in conditions such as late-stage leukemia.Specialists are cautiously appraising reports that a bone marrow transplant - with specially selected donor stem cells -- appears... more

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5 days ago

Claims that there is a Cure for HIV but the risk may be to great

Scientist are seceptical of news that states a man who under went a bone marrow transplant to treat an unrelated acute myeloid... more

TimothyF
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2 responses

5 days ago

AIDS cure nears trial stage

The vaccine will be tested in individuals who are HIV-positive, but not yet symptomatic with AIDS.

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5 days ago

More countries make spreading HIV a crime

LONDON – An increasing number of countries worldwide are making spreading HIV a crime, according to a new report from the International Planned Parenthood Federation.
Health officials fear the trend could undermine gains made in fighting the AIDS pandemic and provoke a surge in cases. Globally, about 33 million people are thought to have HIV and nearly 3 million people are newly infected every year.
"If the law is applied badly, this could set us back and do incredible damage," said Paul de Lay, an AIDS expert at UNAIDS, who was not involved in the report.
De Lay said the laws could result in forced testing and drive the epidemic underground as people hide their HIV status, allowing the virus to spread unnoticed.
According to Planned Parenthood, 58 countries worldwide have laws that criminalize HIV or use existing laws to prosecute people for transmitting the virus. Another 33 countries are considering similar legislation.
Since 2005, seven countries in West Africa have passed HIV laws. In Benin, simply exposing others to HIV is a crime, even if transmission doesn't occur. And in Tanzania, intentional transmission of the virus can lead to life imprisonment.
Many of the laws in Africa were passed after a meeting in Chad in 2004 sponsored by the U.S. Agency for International Development, the world's biggest funder of AIDS programs, and attended by U.N. officials.
"The U.N. was definitely remiss to allow this to happen," said Kevin Osborne, a senior HIV adviser at IPPF and one of the report's authors.
De Lay said UNAIDS found out about the meeting only after it happened.
But poor countries aren't the only ones using these laws.
In the U.S., 32 states have laws criminalizing HIV transmission. Experts estimate that thousands of people have been charged across the country with spreading HIV.
Since 2001, 16 people in the United Kingdom have been prosecuted for spreading HIV.
In 2005, a woman in Canada was charged with criminal negligence and aggravated assault for passing HIV while pregnant to her baby.
She did not tell her doctors that she had HIV and did not receive the medications necessary to prevent the virus from infecting her child. She was sentenced to a six-month conditional sentence followed by three years of probation.
In countries like Britain, Canada and the U.S., which are major donors of efforts to fight AIDS in Africa, such cases are particularly unfortunate, many experts say.
"It sets a poor example in the sense that other countries may then think this is an appropriate or desirable way to deal with HIV," said Richard Elliott, executive director of the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network.
While there might be exceptional cases where prosecuting people who are maliciously spreading HIV makes sense, experts said those were extreme cases.
"The criminal law is a blunt instrument," Osborne said. "If you put everyone in prison with HIV, then you think you've controlled it. But you haven't dealt with the issues around the intimate behaviors that spread HIV."LONDON – An increasing number of countries worldwide are making spreading HIV a crime, according to a new report from the... more