Critics refuse to embrace even the possibility of a sure for AIDS

For so long so many have had to live with the threat of AIDS and helplessly watch a friend or family member die because of this disease.  Now there may be an answer to this problem and instead of everyone pulling together, the report by Kate Kelland of Reuters News Service titled Special Report: An end to AIDS? seems to suggest the opposite. 

In the article she reports that “for his doctors, Timothy Ray Brown was a shot in the dark. An HIV-positive American who was cured by a unique type of bone marrow transplant, the man known as "the Berlin patient" has become an icon of what scientists hope could be the next phase of the AIDS pandemic: its end” but leave it to those who did not come up with this idea to find nothing but negativity.”  Francoise Barre Sinoussi won a Nobel Prize for her work in identifying Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and was even quoted as saying that “we have to think about the long term, including a strategy to find a cure."  "We have to keep on searching until we find one."  But when it comes to this news she flips to say "it's clearly unrealistic to think that this medically heavy, extremely costly, barely reproducible approach could be replicated and scaled-up ... but from a scientist's point of view, it has shown at least that a cure is possible."   “Dr Robert Gallo, of the Institute of Virology at the University of Maryland, puts it bluntly.”It's not practical and it can kill people." And finally we hear from “Vuyiseka Dubula, a South African activist who finds talk of a cure for HIV distracting, almost disconcerting.”This research might not yield results soon, and even when it does, access to that cure is still going to be a big issue," she says. "So in the meantime, while we don't have the answer on whether HIV can be cured or not, we need to save lives."

One have to then begin to try and understand why all these highly intelligent people are not coming together to find a way to upscale this procedure and make it more affordable.  As soon as you ask that question thought, the answer appears to be “caring for HIV patients in developing countries alone already costs around $13 billion a year and that could treble over the next 20 years.  The ultimate goal would allow patients to stop taking AIDS drugs, knocking a hole in a $12 billion-a-year market dominated by Californian drug maker Gilead and the likes of Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline and Merck.”  I have yet to understand why every good thing seems to be slowed or even killed because of the “profit before people” attitude but this always seems to be the case.

However, there is still good news “now scientists working on mimicking the effect of the Berlin patient's transplant have had some success. One experimental technique uses gene therapy to take out certain cells, make them resistant to HIV and then put them back into patients in the hope they will survive and spread. The Berlin patient is proof they could. His case has injected new energy into a field where people for years believed talk of a cure was irresponsible.”  Thank goodness for those who keep looking even though some many of their peers have already given up?