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Showing posts from June 7, 2011

HIV patient 'cured' by extreme procedure

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Since HIV was discovered 30 years ago this week, 30 million people have died from the disease, and it continues to spread at the rate of  7,000 people per day globally , the UN says. There's not much good news when it comes to this devastating virus. But that is perhaps why the story of the man scientists call the "Berlin patient" is so remarkable and has generated so much excitement among the HIV advocacy community. Timothy Ray Brown suffered from both leukemia and HIV when he received a bone marrow stem cell transplant in Berlin, Germany in 2007. The transplant came from a man who was immune to HIV, which scientists say about 1 percent of Caucasians are. (According to San Francisco's CBS affiliate,  the trait may be passed down from ancestors  who became immune to the plague centuries ago. This  Wired story says  it was more likely passed down from people who became immune to a smallpox-like disease.) What happened next has stunned the dozens of scientists who are

First man ‘functionally cured’ of HIV

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Since HIV was discovered 30 years ago this week, 30 million people have died from the disease, and it continues to spread at the rate of  7,000 people per day globally , the UN says. There's not much good news when it comes to this devastating virus. But that is perhaps why the story of the man scientists call the "Berlin patient" is so remarkable and has generated so much excitement among the HIV advocacy community. Timothy Ray Brown suffered from both leukemia and HIV when he received a bone marrow stem cell transplant in Berlin, Germany in 2007. The transplant came from a man who was immune to HIV, which scientists say about 1 percent of Caucasians are. (According to San Francisco's CBS affiliate,  the trait may be passed down from ancestors  who became immune to the plague centuries ago. This  Wired story says  it was more likely passed down from people who became immune to a smallpox-like disease.) What happened next has stunned the dozens of scientists who are