http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/06/05/eveningnews/main20069146.shtml

this is not backed up by time series case studies or the like, but apparently doctors have found a cure that has worked for at least one person (theoretically).

Quote :

"(CBS News) Thirty years ago from Sunday, the Centers for Disease Control issued the first report on the emerging AIDS epidemic. Now, after years of progress in holding back the disease, there is finally an apparent case of one successful cure. CBS News correspondent Hank Plante reports that 45-year-old Timothy Ray Brown, now living in the Bay Area, tested positive for HIV back in 1995, but now has entered the scientific journals as the first man in world history to have his HIV completely eliminated from his body. It's what doctors call a "functional cure." He was living in Berlin, Germany, in 2007, dealing with HIV and leukemia, when scientists there gave him a bone marrow, stem cell transplant that had astounding results. "I quit taking my HIV medication on the day that I got the transplant and haven't had to take any since," Brown says, adding that his diseases are effectively gone. In fact, his only medical problem these days is one involving his speech and motor skills because of neurological damage after the treatment, but that's getting better. "The Berlin Patient," as Brown is known, received stem cells from a donor who was immune to HIV. In fact, about one percent of Caucasians are immune to HIV. Some say it goes back to the Great Plague; People who survived the plague developed an immunity, and that immunity was passed down to their heirs today. Brown says being the first man to be cured of HIV makes him very, very happy. Needless to say, Brown is now being monitored by doctors at San Francisco General Hospital and here at UCSF, where we sought out a medical opinion from one of the most respected AIDS researchers in the world, Dr. Jay Levy, who was one of the co-discoverers of the HIV virus. "If you're able to take the white cells from someone and manipulate them so they're no longer infectable by HIV, and those white cells become the whole immune system of that individual, you've got essentially what we call a functional cure," Dr. Levy says. We also sought out a medical opinion from Dr. Paul Volberding, another pioneering AIDS expert, who has studied the disease for all of its 30 years. "One element of his treatment, and we don't know which, allowed apparently the virus to be purged from his body. So its going to be an interesting, I think, productive area to study," Dr. Volderding says. "He hasn't had any recurrence now for several years I think of the virus, and that hasn't happened before in our experience." Timothy Brown's radical procedure may not be applicable to many other people with HIV, because of the difficulty in doing stem cell transplants, and finding the right donor. But this one case does open the door to the field of "cure research," which is now gaining more attention. "I'm cured of HIV," Brown says. "I had HIV, but I don't anymore." Those are words that so many in the scientific community are now cautiously clinging to. Read more: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/06/05/eveningnews/main20069146.shtml#ixzz1ORy0XBhZ"

6/5/2011 8:12:07 PM

Pretty sure this is [old] news

[Edited on June 5, 2011 at 8:13 PM. Reason : but still cool]

6/5/2011 8:12:47 PM

story just broke 26 minutes ago

6/5/2011 8:13:13 PM

The Berlin patient has been known for a while iirc


is it breaking now because they're officially saying yes, he's absolutely cured? I thought they announced him basically cured a while ago

6/5/2011 8:14:00 PM

Quote :

"Pretty sure this is [old] news"

-- Magic Johnson

6/5/2011 8:14:14 PM

Magic takes a shit ton of pills daily, this involves altering the immune system so the body can defend it on its own

6/5/2011 8:15:34 PM

OH REALLY CAUSE I WAS TOTALLY SERIOUS

6/5/2011 8:16:01 PM

lawl @ Magic Johnson

but seriously

May 17, 2011
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/146949/20110517/timothy-ray-brown-berlin-patient-hiv-cure-video.htm

December 14, 2010
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/14/hiv-cure-berlin-patient_n_796521.html

June 21, 1998
http://www.nytimes.com/1998/06/21/magazine/the-berlin-patient.html

(Obviously wasn't "cured" in 1998, but you get the point)

6/5/2011 8:16:58 PM

samwise is right


i remember learning about this last year in immunology.
badass stuff though.

6/5/2011 8:19:45 PM

Yeah its called stop being gay

6/5/2011 8:20:57 PM

This is Chit Chat. We don't care about people being cured of AIDS/HIV. We care about people GETTING AIDS/HIV so that we can laugh at them.



LULZ

6/5/2011 8:25:37 PM

^^
god damn you're stupid

6/5/2011 8:33:54 PM

^ no I'm just to ignorant to read the story

6/5/2011 8:36:20 PM

my old RA from Carroll Hall found something with gold atoms that helped w/ HIV during his PhD/post doc, etc

he posted on here some a long time ago: buzzday

6/5/2011 8:36:33 PM

6/5/2011 8:36:58 PM

^^nanotech I assume?

6/5/2011 8:40:15 PM

Is that related to this? message_topic.aspx?topic=606396 or message_topic.aspx?topic=610009&page=1#14630217

6/5/2011 8:40:49 PM

man, I bet most college-aged people don't even realize magic has HIV

or that he had a turrible talk show

6/5/2011 8:41:39 PM

hiv virus can hide in many many different tissues and sometimes never manifest a full blown infection, takes a lot of testing to make sure the body is actually clear.

6/5/2011 8:45:45 PM

he had an article in some well-known magazine ... there was a thread in the Lounge about it many yrs ago

here's the article: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080523162920.htm

6/5/2011 8:46:11 PM

Quote :

"one percent of Caucasians are immune to HIV"

fingers crossed!

6/5/2011 8:58:40 PM

^ that stuff fascinates me


like how Caucasians have a higher carrier rate of cystic fibrosis... theories say the frequency increased centuries ago to protect against cholera I believe


or with sickle cell in Africans - it protects them against malaria

6/5/2011 9:04:54 PM

Quote :

"about one percent of Caucasians are immune to HIV"

Maybe I'm in the minority, but I was not aware of this. As said ^^, fingers crossed.

6/5/2011 9:08:47 PM

is there a way to be tested to see if you are immune?

other than inject you with the virus and see if you get it?

6/5/2011 9:09:58 PM

Maybe there's a genetic test? There might be a protective portion of the MHC in the genome

6/5/2011 9:10:51 PM

iirc there is a genetic test you can have


its a mutation of the CCR5 receptor of the t cell.



i know that you can have the test done if you are infected to be prescribed a very specific HIV med (called maraviroc), so i imagine that you can get one if you do not have HIV.




[Edited on June 5, 2011 at 9:13 PM. Reason : i could be wrong here but im pretty sure im right ]

6/5/2011 9:13:11 PM

damn girl you good


CCR5-delta32 allele

6/5/2011 9:15:33 PM

I too read Yahoo News

6/5/2011 9:15:43 PM

we spend quite a long time on this.

and cancer.

6/5/2011 9:16:45 PM

More likely than not, it's expensive (1-2,000 bucks) and not covered by insurance.

6/5/2011 9:17:44 PM

^ lawl... truth



dude Joie... we spend a lot on cancer tooooo

but not really immunology (though we should)... the main problem with us + immunity is that for a lot of disorders they have no idea what the F causes it. most things they can just say "oh... higher susceptibility with this allele"

6/5/2011 9:19:53 PM

I'm surprised that you don't spend more time on primary immune diseases because a lot of them are heritable.

6/5/2011 9:28:20 PM

Oh we definitely talk about the HLA susceptibility alleles and how haplotypes are inherited, etc

We just don't spend a lot of time on how to counsel people about them because even though they are inherited, there are very few of them where we can say with certainty someone will develop it... it's multifactorial inheritance, and hardly any of the diseases you can actually test for, so we can't help people out with it a whole lot until there's more knowledge in the area :\

6/5/2011 9:32:49 PM

Well, I know that immune deficiencies are at least pretty rare and I don't believe many of them survive to reproductive ages. So it may just be a moot point.

[Edited on June 5, 2011 at 9:37 PM. Reason : .]

6/5/2011 9:37:07 PM

those stem cells are marvelous things

6/5/2011 9:38:32 PM

There are a lot of immune disorders where you can survive to a reproductive age... Narcolepsy, Hashimoto, Celiac, MS, rheumatoid arthritis, etc

[Edited on June 5, 2011 at 9:48 PM. Reason : .]

6/5/2011 9:48:27 PM

hence "deficiencies"

6/5/2011 9:50:14 PM

whoops, my b

but going off that, the types of disorders you're referring to we would be counseling for other reasons and not solely immunity... like Hypohidrotic Ectodermal Dysplasia

[Edited on June 5, 2011 at 9:55 PM. Reason : I need to stop trying to do too many things and read the whole post]

6/5/2011 9:54:12 PM

23andme does some sort of test for it. here's the description of the results.

Quote :

"The Delta32 version of CCR5 is inherited in a simple recessive manner. This means that someone must have two copies of Delta32 in order to have no CCR5 protein on their immune cells. Although people with two copies of Delta32 are highly resistant to the most common type of HIV, they can be vulnerable to strains of the virus that do not use CCR5 to enter immune cells. Time of progression to AIDS after infection with HIV is variable and depends on a number of factors. These factors include general immune system function, age, and exposure to other infectious diseases. "

here's my result

Quote :

"Genotype: DI ----- Not resistant to HIV infection but may have slower progression to AIDS after infection."

other results

Quote :

"DD ----- Resistant to infection by the most common strain of HIV people usually encounter, though protection is not complete. II ----- Not resistant to HIV infection; shows average time of progression to AIDS after infection."

i paid $99 for the full health & ancestry testing thing.

[Edited on June 5, 2011 at 9:59 PM. Reason : ]

6/5/2011 9:55:39 PM

Quote :

"Now 45, Brown needs no medicines, and his only health problems are from the mugging he suffered two years ago as he returned home one night in Berlin. Brown was knocked unconscious, required brain surgery and therapy to walk and talk again, and doesn't have full use of one arm. He moved back to the United States in December."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110603/ap_on_he_me/us_med_aids_anniversary

dude has had a rough life

6/5/2011 9:57:57 PM

^^nice


im curious of mine.


where did you get it done?
i totally want one just because

6/5/2011 10:08:24 PM

Isn't it normally like $400? I think there was a sale of $99 a while ago.

^ 23andMe, Navigenics

6/5/2011 10:10:15 PM

if you get the 23andme kit, it includes the CCR5-delta32 SNP check as well.

i don't have the mutation

i signed up for it on the national genetic testing day or whatever it was where they were offering the kit for free + $5/month for a year. pretty fascinating.

6/5/2011 10:13:58 PM

Right now it is $99 + $9/mo for their updates. Follow them on Twitter, they often give coupon codes that reduces it by $99

6/5/2011 10:14:17 PM

dude dude



duuuuuuuuuuuuuuude. i am ALL over this post wedding. cody too.

6/5/2011 10:17:25 PM

I'm kinda meh with the whole DTC testing thing. But then again, I'm on the side of the fence having to deal with people who greatly misunderstand what the thing does or is telling them

[Edited on June 5, 2011 at 10:26 PM. Reason : and quite a bit of doctors won't know how to interpret the results for people]

[Edited on June 5, 2011 at 10:26 PM. Reason : andddd there's not a lot of regulation atm]

6/5/2011 10:26:18 PM

^this.

6/5/2011 10:30:07 PM

Quote :

"where did you get it done? i totally want one just because"

like i said in my post, the testing was done by 23andme. http://www.23andme.com

Quote :

"23andMe, Navigenics"

familytreedna is the other BIG one

Quote :

"Isn't it normally like $400? I think there was a sale of $99 a while ago."

it used to be $499 several years ago, and you'd only get half (either health info or ancestry). my dad bought the test then, for the ancestry part, & a couple of years later they gave him his health info for free once they switched the pricing. my uncle, who is extremely racist, was obsessed over the possibly of having a slave in our family tree. all of our genealogy research pointed to yes. 23andme says my dad is 2% african; i'm 1%. lol

i paid $99 last xmas. i snatched up the free + 1 year monthly subscription thing for my husband a few months ago.

i don't view the tests as any sort of medical diagnosis or advice. it's entertainment with scientific backing to me. one of big reasons i got my husband a kit was bc i wanted to see the odds of us having a kid without brown eyes. he is chinese/cambodian with brown eyes obviously. i'm white with hazel eyes, but my dad has blue eyes.

for anyone curious, the odds for eye color are
71% brown/black
26% green/hazel
4% blue/gray

it also says 100% of our kids will be lactase persistent, have wet earwax, & can taste bitter things. lol

[Edited on June 5, 2011 at 10:39 PM. Reason : one more thing]

6/5/2011 10:34:49 PM

Well, there's a perfect example of why I dislike am "meh" about these tests. Eye color is very hard to determine and has many influences besides recessive and dominant alleles. From what we have studied and I have gathered from recent studies, there's a lot of influence people never knew about and there is still no definitive answer as to what gives a person a certain color for eyes. Even with things like preimplantation genetic diagnosis, you can't predict what the eye color will be (and I'm not so sure they give you percentages)

[Edited on June 5, 2011 at 10:50 PM. Reason : I guess dislike is a strong word.]

[Edited on June 5, 2011 at 10:51 PM. Reason : .]

6/5/2011 10:50:05 PM

*sigh*

apparently you missed the ENTERTAINMENT part of my post. regardless of whether those percentages are correct, it makes no difference. i can't choose what my future child will have and there will be NO way to tell until it pops out. it's just FUN.

6/5/2011 10:56:03 PM