US Doctors React to HIV Cure Story

By Christopher Walker
Dec 16 2010

US doctors are concerned about the possible fallout after a news story yesterday showed that a German man was cured of HIV after receiving a blood stem cell transplant.

AIDS clinics all over the US are reporting hundreds of phone calls from infected patients that want to receive the same procedure to be cured of their infection. However, US doctors have said that such a procedure is extremely dangerous.

The man in question was scheduled to undergo treatment for leukemia where he would have to have his entire immune system destroyed. This required a massive dose of radiation as well as chemotherapy.

Following his immune system destruction he was injected with the donor blood cells. This is the standard treatment for leukemia which has been proven highly successful and most patients end up in remission.

Now three years later the man has no detectable HIV cells in his bloodstream, a dramatic turn of events. But the doctors responsible for this treatment discovered that the donor has a specific gene mutation that is known to fight the most common form of HIV.

However, US doctors have warned that this procedure is extremely dangerous. Just the radiation alone has a death rate of 30% all over the world. Even the doctors who performed the transplant have said that the chances of this treatment becoming widespread as finding the special gene mutation is next to impossible.

The CDC reports that the specific gene mutation is found in only one in one million people in the world.