not cured
[quote]otar wrote:
[quote]AccipiterQ wrote:
This story is several years old at this point. The bone marrow route is not feasible as in order to actually give someone a marrow transplant you have to destroy all of their marrow, bring them to the brink of death, and then graft in the marrow, and then pray they accept it and their body doesn’t reject it. The alternative is medicine to make the virus manageable, and keep you alive. So it’s something that has a high fatality rate vs. a disease that can be managed with a pill per day.
Also people in the past have seroconverted and cleared the virus from their symptoms. The HIV virus itself wasn’t even permanent until a mutation in the 1940s. There’s an interesting chapter on it in Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point. [/quote]
Can you elaborate a bit more? I thought HIV wasn’t even discovered til the 1980s but I do not know a lot about it’s history and you have piqued my interest.[/quote]
HIV was first identified in the early 80s, but had been around. I saw an article on CNN last year at some point that stated based on it’s average rate of mutation, scientists can actually retroactively estimate when it first crossed over into humans. The date they gave was somewhere in the 1890s I believe. I can’t find it now actually. Retroactively the first confirmed case was a Bantu man in 1959. However there are several diseases, opportunistic infections, that are considered to be an almost surefire sign that a person is suffering from AIDS. There are types of sarcomas for instance that usually only effect the elderly. There are cases in the early 20th century of outbreaks of these diseases, probably from shared vaccination needles, and then the people actually recovered and led normal lives. The book from Malcolm Gladwell was fascinating, definitely a recommended read, I believe he has citations in the book that you could look into further.