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Comment by bmelton | Hacker News Reader

A friend of mine was in pretty bad straits with the AIDS virus, full blown, and got into early clinical trials in a potential AIDS cure (don't know if it's this or not).

When we last spoke, his white blood cell count was up, and there was literally no trace of the virus in his blood stream; which is to say that while the virus may not have been 100% eradicated, any presence was literally undetectable.

That was over a year and a half ago, and I recently heard that he's still A-Okay, but I've heard surprisingly little about successful trials in the news.

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Modern antiretrovirals are very effective. Combined with a healthy immune system, it's entirely possible for HIV to be present, but knocked into submission. Both health risks and chances of propagation are significantly reduced. That doesn't, however, mean the virus has been eliminated.

So the great part of this is that pretty much you can live to a ripe old age. The issue is price. If we can TREAT it for a person's life, thats great. That is no solution for a massive epidemic in Africa though where we'd be lucky to vaccinate everyone if we could, nevermind a long-term treatment.

Africa's always going to be a problem. Assuming this vaccine is effective, we need to take the same approach to HIV that we did to smallpox. That will likely mean substantial Western subsidies for poorer nations, and a concerted boots-on-the-ground effort to administer the vaccine. It will be a long time before HIV is eliminated, and it will come at a substantial cost to taxpayers, but it's well worth it to rid ourselves of this disease.

> That will likely mean substantial Western subsidies for poorer nations, and a concerted boots-on-the-ground effort to administer the vaccine.

It will also mean knocking the people who are convinced the vaccines cause AIDS out of the political world, lest they destroy our ability to do that. This will require action in both the Western world and in Africa, and will make a number of people very unhappy.

I know most people here don't care about those morons. However, any accounting of the cost has to include the political cost.

you may not need as many boots on the ground if you use this topical vaccine approach http://gcc.eyeptv.net/blog/2011/03/08/needle-free-topical-ap...

The title seems to be off, from the article: "... she and her team gear up for the first round of human trials of an HIV vaccine." from that it sounds like they are starting human trials. As I this is not the first vaccine to get to this stage, it's certainly not what your friend was given (I assume your friend is human) as they haven't tested on humans yet.

That's normal. HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, is now easy to treat. It hasn't killed many rich people for 15 years.

Not to take anything away from your comment, but he was well past having just HIV, and full bore into AIDS, and he was also not even remotely wealthy. Having graduated from living in his car full time to a 180 square foot apartment just before his uninsured car was stolen.

He probably meant "rich" in the global sense.

True, that is incredible that we can kick this disease pretty hard now. However the problem still stands, the only known solution is a bone marrow transplant and that requires a corpse + a 50/50 chance to die.

Bone marrow is generally harvested from living people.

Some links here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bone_marrow#Harvesting

I'm guessing he wasn't sick in the USA, since you actually need to be rich to pay for specialized healthcare here.

20 years, for Magic Johnson.

He has to be a statistical outlier. Freddie Mercury had cash too, but that didn't save him. Same for Easy E. I'd be very interested in studying Magic's genotype and seeing what makes him so special.

A vaccine would prevent you from getting aids, but probably not cure it.

To wit, I believe it is both a vaccine and a cure, though again, I'm scarce on details -- but I had the same question for him when he first told me about it.

its hard to believe it would be a cure cause HIV mutates quite rapidly in people creating a fair amount of resistant strains

That's awesome, happy to hear he's doing so well.

That must have been a different thing right? Because vaccines don't work anymore when you're already infected? But still that's amazing news!

Depends on the vaccine. There have recently been a number of vaccines that claimed to work after infection as well.

I said elsewhere in the thread as well, but that was my question to him, and he indicated that it was intended to be marketed as a vaccine, but his trial was as a post-infection cure.

I do believe it was the same product.

Edit: It was said above, but the word I couldn't think of at the time was 'antiretroviral'.

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