Is it possible to recover from HIV infection?

For several decades now, the best minds of humanity have been struggling with the question of whether HIV infection can be cured. For now, the disease is considered a death sentence: without receiving drugs that inhibit the multiplication of the virus, an infected person dies within a few years.

Some statistics

Currently, the number of deaths from HIV infection is decreasing. However, just last year, more than a million people around the world died from this terrible disease, or more precisely from its last stage - acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). And if in Europe and the USA the mortality rate from HIV is decreasing, then in Russia this figure is growing (in 2016, 18 and a half thousand Russians died from the infection, in 2017 - more than 20 thousand). In our country, more than a million people are currently registered with HIV infection. According to WHO, 80% of infections in Eastern Europe occur in Russia.

Modern Treatment: Containment Strategy

Is HIV infection completely curable? Unfortunately, the answer is no. There is no medicine that can rid a person of the virus. Drugs have been developed that slow down the reproduction process of the pathogen and delay the moment when the patient develops immunodeficiency. However, a complete recovery is not yet possible. And even if a person receives full treatment and carefully monitors his health, according to statistics, he will live 10 years less than if he had not become infected with the human immunodeficiency virus.

Is there hope?

Can HIV infection be cured with drugs? The answer to this question is negative. However, two cases of recovery from the disease have been recorded in the world.

The first of these occurred in Great Britain. The patient, whose name is kept secret, was diagnosed with HIV infection in 2003. In 2012, he was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma. Treatment for lymphoma was carried out as follows: the patient's bone marrow cells were “killed” with chemotherapy, after which he was transplanted with donor stem cells. Doctors were able to select a donor with a mutation that reduces the likelihood of infection with the immunodeficiency virus. A year and a half after the transplant, it turned out that the patient did not have the virus in his blood.

In 2007, a similar story occurred in Berlin, where American citizen Timothy Ray was transplanted with donor bone marrow, after which the virus was no longer detectable in his blood. Moreover, even the most sensitive tests do not register it. Brown went down in the history of modern medicine under the code name “Berlin patient”.

Will bone marrow transplantation become a routine procedure?

Is it possible to cure all infected people from HIV infection by transplanting them with donor bone marrow? Doctors are still afraid to make optimistic forecasts. The fact is that destroying a patient’s own bone marrow cells is a dangerous procedure, fraught with all sorts of complications and requiring long-term rehabilitation. This way you can cure HIV infection, but at the same time create a number of additional problems and complications for the patient. It is possible that it will shorten the lives of patients no less than HIV infection. In addition, this method of treatment will become too expensive and the state simply will not have enough funds to cure everyone. Both patients, who are now cured of HIV, received transplants because they had developed tumors of the immune system.

Healing was achieved due to graft versus host reaction. That is, “foreign” immune cells began to attack the recipient tissue. As a result, viral particles were also destroyed. Is HIV infection completely cured in this way? So far, doctors are not giving long-term prognoses and continue to monitor the health of both patients with bone marrow transplants.

Is HIV infection curable or not? There is currently no cure. Thanks to modern drugs, it is possible to slow down the spread of the virus throughout the body and give patients the opportunity to live a full life. We can only dream of creating a drug that will eliminate the pathogen.