How late can AIDS cure come?

One of every three children born with HIV can die before even reaching their first birthday, and about a half of the estimated 400,000 HIV positive infants per year can lost their lives before turning two. Of the 33.4 million people living with HIV in 2008, 15.7 million are women that can possibly transfer the disease to their future children. In average, 430,000 children under 15 years of age were infected in that same year, and 280,000 of them have died.

The number of lives lost could have been smaller if medication was started earlier. This was partly because HIV treatment for children under the age of one was not available in many settings. In the next days, though, health authorities are expanding its availability to provide diagnostic testing on infants four to six weeks old. Further, they ought to totally end mother-to-child transmission by giving all pregnant women with antiretroviral drugs. This should protect against HIV transmission during pregnancy, delivery and or breastfeeding.

However, what everyone is looking forward to is finding the cure that will eradicate the deadly virus from a human’s system. Medical practitioners, scientist, patients, patients’ loved ones, and all others want this life snatcher ended forever. In the recent International AIDS Conference in Vienna, Geneva, it appears that scientists are again open to the notion of a cure. Sadly, not a very good amount of budget is available for research of HIV/AIDS Cure. Besides the problem on monetary fund, scientists know that this will still go a long way.

What instigated this new light? Today, HIV/AIDS can only be controlled but not eradicated, because of being able to persist in diverse cells and physical locations. Even with intensified therapy, low levels of HIV viremia persist. On the other hand, a bone marrow transplant was singled out to have cured a man infected by human immunodefiency virus.

It appears that the apparent cure was because the man’s HIV was CCR5-tropic, entering target cells using CCR5 receptor. But the donor had a mutation that left his immune cells without receptor. In two years after transplant, the patient remains well and off antiretroviral drugs. It seems that any remaining virus in the patient are not replicating. Researchers will try to find out if the apparent cure can be duplicated therapeutically through gene transfer. With scarce fund, though, HIV-stricken people will most likely wait long for dawn to come. And countless more will face grim death.