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.