- According to the WHO there are around 38 million people living with HIV in the world.
- When the disease progresses it becomes AIDS and the chances of dying are almost 100%.
- An umbilical cord blood stem cell transplant may have helped achieve HIV remission in a New York woman.
Advances in Medicine are increasingly surprising thanks to technological innovations. Beyond vaccines, today there is a wide variety of treatments but there is still a disease for which a cure has not been able to be created. Now that could be a thing of the past thanks to the first remission of HIV with stem cells from the umbilical cord.
The origins of the disease are uncertain because it is suspected to have existed since the mid-20th century. The truth is that it was not until the early eighties that it was baptized and since then it has grown exponentially.
To date, it is estimated that almost 38 million people are living with HIV worldwide. While the annual number of deaths from this disease has fallen below one million since 2017. In any case, it still remains a public health problem, especially in low-income countries.
HIV and AIDS are not the same
An important point to emphasize is that HIV and AIDS are not synonymous. On the one hand, HIV is the first stage of the disease and can be treatable through the constant use of antiretrovirals for life. On the other hand, when it is not treated, it evolves to AIDS, which is the advanced and most dangerous phase. When that happens, the death of the patient in the short term is quite probable.
Now, it is time to talk about news that has gone around the world. This is the first reported remission of HIV with stem cells from the umbilical cord in the world. Although some media handle it as a “cure” it is not really the correct term.
What is a referral?
Within medicine it is used to describe the attenuation or complete disappearance in the patient of the signs and symptoms of his disease. It can be as a consequence of a treatment or spontaneously.
This leads to an exceptional case that could be the start of future treatments. She is an infected woman whose identity has been hidden for security reasons and for this reason she is known as the Patient New York because it is the city in which he lives.
As part of the medical care received, in 2017 he underwent a umbilical cord stem cell transplant and the most surprising thing is that since then the viral amount in his body has drastically decreased. For this reason it is classified as a successful case of HIV remission.
In this way, it joins other cases known as the Patients Berlin, London and Düsseldorf with which similar results have been obtained. Now the most important part is to identify the reason why he managed to recover from this disease considered until before as incurable.
Within what is known is that all the cases described received stem cell transplants from matched adults carrying two copies of the CCR5-delta32 mutation. One of its characteristics is that it confers resistance by preventing the virus from entering cells and infecting them. Therefore, it could be the key to achieving HIV remission with other patients.
Also read:
The most frequent myths and taboos about HIV that you must eradicate
Chart of the Day: Progress Against HIV/AIDS Over the Last 20 Years
The Latin American countries with the most confirmed cases of HIV