Did you hear? THEY CURED AIDS!
It’s over, everybody! Bring on the risky and unprotected sex! The worlds supply of condoms will now have to be repurposed and used for candle snifters, or tiny handbags. The world is saved! Brilliant German scientists have brought an end to the world wide plague that is HIV!
Except they didn’t.
Here is the story via MSNBC:
In 2007, the man received a bone marrow transplant to treat his leukemia. The transplant — which treats leukemia by essentially rebooting the body’s immune system and creating new white blood cells —also had the benefit of wiping out the HIV infection. Now, three and a half years later, the patient remains HIV-free, which suggests he is cured of the disease, the researchers said.
OK. We have to be really careful here. One of the things that I am annoyingly earnest about is science education, and skeptical inquiry. I feel like an appreciation for the scientific method, and a firm and critical eye for what is and isn’t true are the most important tools you can have at your disposal when trying to make sense of the world. Part of this is being comfortable with not having clear answers. Science is very, very slow. Things are often not clearly known, and even less understood. The bar is much higher in the scientific community for what is and is not fact. Tests must be done, and then redone. Experiments must provide reliable, quantifiable results, over and over again, and must be throughly peer reviewed. Then again, results are in and of themselves substantial, and when something works, that’s hard to argue with. But we have to be careful using words like “cure”.
The article goes on to point this out:
So exactly why the patient doesn’t have any detectable HIV in his body remains a mystery. It’s possible that through the entire course of treatment, both types of HIV were eliminated from the body, Zack said.
However, “We don’t know if it would always happen, or whether there’s still some of that virus somewhere in the body that hasn’t been sampled,” Zack said.
Ultimately, the results would need to be reproduced before researchers could know whether this was an option for treating HIV, Zack said. And, practically, finding donors would be a challenge — only one percent of Northern Europeans are known to have this particular mutation, Zack said.
What we have here is information. A specific set of circumstances produced a specific result in one documented case. It is, to be sure, a great big piece of information, but it is not proof of any effective method all by its encouraging little self. Information is always good. But, the only thing information gives us is the need for more information.
This is good news though. But let’s keep it together out there, OK?
Oh, and this guy had Leukemia, and HIV? Damn. That sucks. But he got cured of both. This guy’s life is bipolar.
