HIV Cure: encouraging news from the UK
The Independent reports that a medicinal product has been developed that will be used in the near future for HIV treatment.This was done by a team of scientists from the five most famous universities in the UK - Oxford, Cambridge, as well as Imperial, Royal and University colleges.The new therapy is already tested on 50 volunteers who have been diagnosed with HIV and in the course of the study one of them( a man of 44 years old) was actually cured of HIV - at least after the end of the course of innovative therapy, the presence of the immunodeficiency virus in his blood was not found.
To date, antiretroviral therapy exists and is successfully used, which allows monitoring the patient's condition, stabilizing the whole organism and suppressing the activity of already infected cells.Yes, a person with this therapy can live a long enough life, but the problem lies in the fact that the organism does not "go away" from the body - there are millions of infected T-lymphocytes temporarily idle.Innovative therapy, on the contrary, is designed not just to stabilize and protect the body, but also to directly destroy the virus.
In The Sunday Times, a statement was made by one of the experts of the National Research Institute of Great Britain: "This is the first attempt at complete cure for HIV."Researchers emphasize that it is too early to assert about the "invention" of therapy, which eliminates 100% of the immunodeficiency virus, but significant progress is being made in this direction.The existing treatment regimen is not yet ready for use in a wide range of patients with diagnosed HIV.But Professor of the Imperial College, Sarah Fiedler, says that if the research program continues, a breakthrough will be made in the treatment of HIV in the next five years.
To date, only isolated cases of cure for HIV are known - several newborns and three adult patients.All three adults( one - a patient at the Berlin Medical University and two - patients from the Boston Clinic) got rid of the human immunodeficiency virus after a bone marrow transplant.The operations were carried out for medical reasons - all these people were diagnosed with brain cancer.But even these facts come under great doubt, the doctors themselves confirm that a long-term remission can be accepted for a complete cure for HIV.To make sure that the immunodeficiency virus is not present in the body of these adults, it is necessary to cancel the ongoing therapy - this is fraught with danger to the life of patients and, of course, no one will take responsibility for it.
The World Health Organization provides statistics on the world's population of 36.7 million people diagnosed with HIV, more than 1.5 million people die every year from the immunodeficiency virus, and about 2, 2 million are newly infected.In Russia, more than a million people with the immunodeficiency virus live, but only 37% of patients who are registered with a specialized medical facility receive medical assistance, which is only 28% of the total number of patients.
The United Nations recently stated that it is Russia that is the state with the largest HIV epidemic in the world.Russia is ahead of such countries as Kenya, Zimbabwe and Uganda, Mozambique, according to the rate of increase in the number of patients.And this is despite the fact that in each of these countries the immunodeficiency virus infected is twice as large as in Russia
Tsygankova Yana Aleksandrovna, medical reviewer, therapeutist of the highest qualification category
