If I’ve learned anything in my short but meaningful life on this planet, it’s that, at the end of the day, when all is said and done, our health is the most important aspect of life. It does not matter what you do for a living, or who you choose to spend time with because if we don’t take care of our bodies, we will have less time to worry about such extraneous elements of life.
For individuals suffering from serious diseases, the whole “carpe diem” lifestyle becomes all the more necessary, especially when a person’s disease hasn’t been cured. Scientists believe that HIV originated from a virus particular to certain breeds of
While this may be entirely possible, it would be another fifty years before the world would pay attention to the atrocities caused by HIV and AIDS. In 1981, there was a sudden increase in reports of a rare forms of pneumonia and cancer diagnosed in young gay males. Originally, the disease was stigmatically referred to as Gay-Related Immune Deficiency, or GRID, because medical professionals somehow thought that only gay men could contract a disease. Mind you, this was the 80s, and homophobia was alive and well. Several years later, the disease was renamed Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) following the first case of AIDS in Canada back in 1982.
Fast-forward to 2013, and an estimated thirty-five million people were reported to be living with HIV. In the history of the virus, only one person has ever been cured, and his name is Timothy Ray Brown, also referred to as the “Berlin Patient.” Brown had HIV for over a decade until he underwent two stem cell operations in 2007 and the virus was somehow cleared from his body. In popular culture, I assume many of you know of one Earvin “Magic” Johnson, famous for being of the greatest NBA players of all time, as well as for being an individual who has thrived despite being diagnosed with HIV nearly thirty years ago.
The medical community has spent decades researching HIV/AIDS, and has spent billions trying to find a cure for the life-threatening virus, but no major advancements have been made. Recent statistics indicate that in the thirty-five years since HIV was discovered and started spreading, the disease has killed thirty-five million people.
Interestingly enough, today it was reported that there may be a second patient who was cured of his HIV virus. According to Vox, the new patient, who has remained anonymous, had a form of cancer and underwent treatment involving chemotherapy to clear his immune system and, through a stem cell transplant, receive cancer-free donor cells. Back in 2017, nearly a year after his transplant, the patient stopped taking his antiretroviral drugs for HIV and miraculously tested negative for HIV. Outside of the incredible fact that this man was cured, the question remains whether the disease can ultimately be cured.
According to Vox, of the dozen patients with HIV who received a similar transplant like the London patient and the Berlin patient, eight individuals died from transplant-related side effects. No matter how you look at it, its clear that medical experts are still eons away from finding a mass-production cure for the HIV virus, especially because, in the two cases where the two men were cured, the treatment nearly killed each of them.
“At the moment the only way to treat HIV is with medications that suppress the virus, which people need to take for their entire lives, posing a particular challenge in developing countries. Finding a way to eliminate the virus entirely is an urgent global priority, but it is particularly difficult because the virus integrates into the white blood cells of its host.”
–Professor Ravindra Gupta, University of Cambridge
