This was an eye opening article From Web MD. In the article they discuss the statistics of young adults unaware they were living with HIV in 2006. The numbers are frightening to think how many of these young people have unknowingly infected theirs partners with the HIV virus.
The article is here. Please encourage everyone to get tested. It is not just your health at risk!
Young, HIV-Positive, and Unaware
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According to media reports this week, an American patient living in Germany and suffering with both leukemia and HIV was apparently cured of both conditions following a bone marrow transplant from a unique donor. The donor possessed a very rare genetic variation that makes it difficult for HIV to enter into his healthy cells. In essence, by transplanting bone marrow from this particular donor to the HIV positive patient, the patient developed a new immune system capable of fending off HIV.
Bone marrow transplants might not be the most efficacious, or comfortable, means of rebuilding an immune system that can contend with HIV. However, there are other means of reprogramming the immune system, and without putting the patient's life at greater risk. Vaccines offer one such approach, but one thus far proven ineffective and even detrimental for those at risk of contracting HIV. Vaccines reprogram the immune system by triggering it to generate antibodies to proteins, or antigens, on the surface of viruses.
Because HIV gets inside of healthy cells so fast, there is little time for the antibodies to do their part, diminishing the ultimate value of vaccines for this disease. The recent failure of Merck's vaccine, V520, in which the risk of contracting HIV increased after vaccination, is a testament to the limited utility of vaccines for HIV.
Fortunately, antibodies are not the only means of reprogramming the immune system.
To read More Click Here.
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/129797.php
Posted on: Saturday, 15 November 2008, 08:57 CST
Scientists have unraveled in unprecedented detail the cascade of events that go wrong in brain cells affected by HIV, a virus whose assault on the nervous system continues unabated despite antiviral medications that can keep the virus at bay for years in the rest of the body.
The new research reveals key steps taken in the brain by Tat, a protein that is central to HIV's attack on cells called neurons. Researchers discovered the receptor that Tat uses to attack neurons, and they were able to reverse the effects of Tat in the laboratory by blocking the receptor.
The discovery of a major molecular player in the process opens up a new avenue for researchers to explore in their efforts to prevent or treat HIV's neurological effects, for which there is no currently approved treatment. Researchers say that much of the molecular action that underlies HIV's attack on the brain also occurs in other diseases, such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases, and that the results spell progress for those conditions as well.
DermaVir Patch, the Company's lead nanomedicine candidate for treatment-na? HIV-infected individuals, is designed to amplify de novo HIV-specific memory T-cell responses of HIV-infected individuals and improve the ability of their own immune system to control the disease.
BERLIN (AP) — An American man who suffered from AIDS appears to have been cured of the disease 20 months after receiving a targeted bone marrow transplant normally used to fight leukemia, his doctors said Wednesday. While researchers — and the doctors themselves — caution that the case might be no more than a fluke, others say it may inspire a greater interest in gene therapy to fight the disease that claims 2 million lives each year. The virus has infected 33 million people worldwide. Dr. Gero Huetter said his 42-year-old patient, an American living in Berlin who was not identified, had been infected with the AIDS virus for more than a decade. But 20 months after undergoing a transplant of genetically selected bone marrow, he no longer shows signs of carrying the virus.
Doctors say marrow transplant may have cured AIDS
Researchers at the University of Toronto and the University of California, San Francisco, have revealed new hope for HIV treatment with the discovery of a way to 'rescue' immune cells that are exhausted from fighting off HIV infection.
The team lead by Drs. Mario Ostrowski, of the University of Toronto's Faculty of Medicine, and Douglas Nixon, of the Division of Experimental Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, has discovered that a molecule called Tim-3 is present at high levels on poorly functional immune system cells which are 'exhausted' from fighting HIV infection. The researchers found that blocking the activity of Tim-3 on these cells improved their function and allowed them to rejoin the battle against HIV.
For A link To the Article Click Here
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/128917.php
