From Fox News, no less:
Doctors claim HIV positive man cured.
Timothy Ray Brown, an HIV-positive American living in Germany, had leukemia and was undergoing chemotherapy, when he received a transplant of stem cells from a donor carrying a rare, inherited gene mutation that seems to make carriers virtually immune to HIV infection.
And for those who don't click the FNC links
huffpost
h/t ericlewis0
But the good news is limited:
It’s hard enough to get a good compatible match for a transplant like this," Fauci told FoxNews.com, "But you also have to find compatible donor that has this genetic defect, and this defect is only found in 1 percent of the Caucasian population and zero percent of the black population. This is very rare.
Nevertheless, curing someone - anyone - of HIV is great news, and this obviously raise the possibility of doing some gene splicing and inserting the HIV immunity gene into compatible tissue years down the road.
I can imagine the head explosions among some elements of the far right.
- It helps gays
- It uses stem cells
- It came from Germany, where they have inferior socialized medicine that can't possibly be as good as ours
- The patient is an American living in Germany so obviously some sort of disloyalty to the USA is involved
Update:
This may be a good time to mention that healthy Kossacks should sign up for the bone marrow registry. You may very well save a life.
National Marrow Donor Program