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Renowned African-American HIV/AIDS expert Dr. James E.K. Hildreth spoke to EBONY about the disease and reports that a second man is in remission from HIV.
On Tuesday, the journal Nature reported the apparent cure of an HIV patient from London, who had undergone a bone marrow transplant. The man has been free of the infection for 18 months. Although doctors are hesitant to call it a full cure, the news has rekindled hope that scientists will be able to rid millions of those infected within the near future.
“What
was published was that a second patient was cured, but we have to put that in
parentheses because it’s still the early days,” Hildreth said. “[We have] an HIV-positive
individual who developed some form of cancer. We destroy his bone marrow [and]
totally wipe out his immune system. We’re going to restore his immune system by
giving him bone marrow from a person who is resistant to HIV. The second
patient validates the result of the first.”
In 2008, it
was announced that Timothy Ray Brown—the so-called “Berlin Patient”— was the
first person cured of HIV/AIDS after undergoing a bone marrow transplant from a
resistant donor to treat his leukemia. He has since lived free of the disease
for more than a decade.
Hildreth,
president of Meharry
Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee, said it is great news that the
procedure worked on two patients, but he does not believe it will be available to
the public soon.
“The
individuals who have this mutation in their HIV receptor are all of
Caucasian/European descent, and that’s only a small percentage of the total
population,” he said. “For a bone marrow transplant, we have to match the bone
marrow of the donor to the recipient. And it is highly unlikely that a Black
person or a person of African descent can accept a bone marrow donated from
someone of Eastern European or European descent because it wouldn’t be a
match.”
The doctor,
however, does believe it opens the possibly of using gene-editing technology,
which has its own “downstream effects,” to come up with a means to treat
HIV/AIDS.
Hildreth also addressed the speculation that famed holistic doctor Alfredo Bowman, better known as Dr. Sebi, previously cured AIDS through veganism and a cocktail of herbs and spices.
Watch the full video above.
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