British doctors from Oxford and Cambridge Universities, as well as University and King's Colleges in London, announced the first case of an adult cured of HIV infection. Reported by The Sunday Times.
A 44-year-old Briton has recovered from HIV infection. He became the first of 50 people to successfully undergo special antiviral therapy. The new technique, according to scientists, allows you to track and destroy HIV all over the body at once, and not just in those places where the virus is most active. Studies have shown that the content of the virus in his blood after undergoing therapy is so small that it led to negative test results.
Standard antiretroviral therapy suppresses active infected cells, but does not affect the remaining infected T lymphocytes. This means that currently existing drugs are able to control the activity of HIV infection, but not get rid of it. Scientists note that their proposed therapy is still undergoing trials and is not intended for widespread clinical implementation.
By 2014, according to WHO, about 37 million people in the world were infected with HIV, and 34 million died from causes associated with the disease. By this time, about 1.5 million people died from the virus every year and about 2.2 million became carriers of the virus. Fewer than half of those affected are receiving antiviral therapy.
In 2014, more than 92 thousand new HIV cases were registered in Russia, which is 12 percent more than in 2013. In October 2015, Health Minister Veronika Skvortsova said that by 2020, the HIV epidemic in Russia could get out of control.
The Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) causes a slowly developing disease that affects the immune system, leaving the body unable to defend against infections that are harmless to a healthy individual. Currently, the disease is considered not amenable to complete cure, however, modern antiviral therapy allows minimizing the development of HIV infection, the final and irreversible stage of which is AIDS.