A US citizen cured of HIV?

Seems too good to be true.  I've been flooded with emails at work and on Facebook the last few days about this story, how the cure for HIV has been found.  Well sort of.

I first heard this story 2 years ago when it first happened.  There was some discussion on HIV activists blogs and even then Scientists were skeptical on whether the virus actually was eradicated from this person's body, or was it hiding somewhere just waiting to start replicating again.  So they held off for 2 years before publishing the study this year, and now becoming one of the top medical research stories of the year.  And that's how I found out that this topic is becoming headline news now.

Timothy Ray Brown is a 44 year old American citizen who was living in Berlin, Germany when he had his surgery.  Besides being diagnosed with HIV, Mr. Brown also was fighting acute myeloid leukemia.  The leukemia was of more concern, and he was told he needed to get a bone marrow transplant immediately.  German doctors knowing that they would have to kill off his current bone marrow and replace it with a donor's, and that he had HIV, they knew his body would be severly susceptible to all infections without an immune system to fight them off.  In a fortunate, but very rare situation, they were able to find a Bone Marrow donor who also had a genetic mutation that made the donor resistant in getting HIV.  This genetic mutation has only been found in caucasian men and less then 1% of the total caucasian population has this mutation.  Taking into consideration the amount of bone marrow donors there are and the rarity of this mutation, you can see how this was similar to winning not only the lottery, but winning the lottery in every state.

So after getting this transplant, is Mr. Brown now cured of HIV?  Doctors are still hesitant to say, but after 2 years of yet showing any HIV in his system, the answer is quite possibly yes.  Does this mean that we now have a cure for HIV?  No.  Why?

CNN gives 3 good reasons why this procedure cannot be used to cure the over 30 million people who are living with HIV.

1. The chances of finding a bone marrow donor with two copies of this genetic mutation for every one of the 33 million people worldwide living with HIV or AIDS is not realistic because only one percent of Caucasians and zero percent of African Americans or Asians have this particular genetic mutation.


2. Bone marrow transplants are dangerous for patients. Before they can get the donated stem cells that will replace their own, they have to take strong chemotherapy to destroy their own bone marrow – leaving them without an immune system to fight off any disease – until the transplanted bone marrow can make new blood cells. Plus patients run the risk of rejecting the new cells, which means they have to take immune-suppressing drugs for the rest of their life.

3. Bone marrow transplants are very expensive and not an option for many people living with this disease around the world.

Just how dangerous are bone marrow transplants? About one-third of patients die during them, Dr. Jay Levy told Health.com last year.

Bottom line: It's exciting news, but not likely to cure the global AIDS pandemic.

Controversy around HIV photo exhibit at Overture Center

via Channel 27

MADISON (WKOW) -- There's a blank spot on the wall amid a striking collection of photos at the Overture Center's latest exhibit, "Living with HIV/AIDS: Perspectives Through the Lens."


The gallery, which runs through Sunday, features work done by people who have HIV/AIDS. These photos are their stories.

Project coordinators hope to bring about awareness of the disease and lessen the stigma surrounding it. But on the day before the exhibit opened, one photo was pulled from the wall, with a small card in its place explaining the photo removed "may not be suitable for all viewing audiences."

The photo depicts a naked man sitting with several pill bottles hiding his genitals. Titled "Stripped," it was meant to send the message that while everything else can be stripped away, the fatal HIV/AIDS virus remains.

The Overture Center says the picture is too graphic to be featured in the main rotunda entrance to the building, through which hundreds of young children pass every day on field trips and family outings.

"If a little kid sees medicine on the genitals, it's going to cause some confusion, without question," said Overture spokesperson Robert Chappell.

Chappell says it's not so much the photo as it is the location.

"If this exhibit were in a location anywhere else in the building, where a kid might see it but 7,500 kids aren't going to see it, it would probably still be there. If it was in a spot where we could put up a sign saying 'for mature audiences,' it would probably still be there. It's all about appropriateness and a certain amount of discretion," said Chappell.

But Heidi Nass, who coordinated the gallery and also took part as a woman living with HIV, says Overture's decision further stigmatizes and silences the HIV/AIDS community.

"The further you squash the story, the more silence you create. That's my big concern. And for those of us living with HIV, it doesn't get any easier when an art center chooses not to defend art. They didn't give the community a chance to applaud the art, to criticize the art, or to see the art. They - and I don't know who 'they' are - just decided that it wasn't okay," said Nass.

The Overture Center did give the artist a chance to replace the photo with a different one, but Heidi Nass says it's not that easy, because these photos are really a part of each artist's intimate story and they were chosen carefully.

There are two other photos by the same artist that also include naked men, but Overture officials did not find those to be inappropriate.

When asked whether Overture could simply relocate the gallery, Chappell said that was not an option, given the fact that other exhibits currently inhabit the rest of the space.

This is the first time in its six-year history that the arts center has removed a piece of art