The first HIV patient was cured

The world has just witnessed an impressive medical breakthrough when doctors believe that an HIV-positive man has been cured of a century-old disease through the treatment of stem cell transplantation.

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The process of treatment with stem cell transplantation is opening up the prospect of cure for HIV-infected patients. Illustration

According to the Huffington Post, Timothy Ray Brown, German-Americans, also known as " Berlin Patient ", has received stem cell transplants since 2007 under a long-running program for treating leukemia.

Brown's physicians recently published a report in Blood magazine confirming that the results of this time-consuming trial " strongly support the treatment of HIV-infected patients ". . The report emphasized that stem cell transplantation alone helped cure both leukemia and AIDS in Brown patients.

However, this announcement caused a heated debate.Fox news agency quoted some experts as saying, the result was obtained not only by stem cell transplant method. According to them, rather, Brown " has been transplanted stem cells from a donor who possesses a rare mutant genotype, apparently causing people with almost immunity to HIV ."

Treatment like Brown is described as a " near-death method ," very expensive and requires donors of HIV-infected stem cells. Moreover, the ability to find donors of such special cells is very fragile.

Experts judged that Mr. Brown's case is opening a new path for developing a long-term treatment for HIV infection through stem cell genetic engineering. It is very promising but not an easy solution.

Recently, the prestigious Time magazine voted on another finding related to AIDS century into the list of Top 10 medical breakthroughs in 2010. Recent studies show that healthy people take medicine Antiviral - a drug commonly prescribed for HIV treatment, can reduce the risk of disease in the next century by 73%.

Although the findings do not mean that scientists have found effective treatments for people infected with HIV, they can certainly bring hope to more than 33 million people living with the disease. all over the world. In addition to such breakthroughs, global efforts to prevent disease have been boosted with new initiatives in the Philippines and South Africa this week.