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Comment by BubbasDad | Hacker News Reader

In 2013 a very highly-placed Goldman Sachs exec, a friend of a friend, told me his AMFAR contacts predicted a 'genetics-based cure' in a 3-4 years instead of the 10 years they publicly projected. The rationale was donations would stop if people knew how close they were to a cure.

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Even if AIDS is defeated, there's always other medical maladies that affect people. MRSA, for one.

That's not really the attitude towards curing disease.

It's not towards anything in life.

Didn't they already cure it? Magic Johnson had it, but now he doesn't. Or do you mean "cure it for non-basketball-millionaires"?

I think by cure they mean eradicate the virus, rather than suppress it. Most people can live relatively normal lives by keeping their viral load low, but this involves taking expensive medications every day for the rest of one's life. The drugs are things like protease inhibitors, modified DNA bases, etc. that muck up the virus' replication machinery so that it cannot make more copies.

The goal of a lot of researchers is basically an HIV antimicrobial that kills the virus in the same way you might treat pneumonia, so that maintenance therapy is not needed.

I think people also forget that it's not as simple as taking a pill and all is good. All medications carry side effects and risks. Even Tylenol can cause major problems like hearing loss down the line. As I recall, the life expectancy of this cohort is close but still below the general population. This difference is probably a reflection of a lower quality of life, which don't ultimately take their toll for a long time. There's also the ongoing risk that the drugs may fail to work at some point or that the patients may not be a good candidate for them or there may be interactions interfering with other treatments.

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