Early days yet, but most common form of ‘Bubble boy’ disease appears… cured.

In “Our Neural Chernobyl” Bruce Sterling suggested that HIV would prove exceptionally useful, once we broke it on the wheel; it could be used to deliver gene therapies efficiently, quickly, and while bypassing the cell’s normal defenses. According to the BBC, we’re now using it to do just that: “US scientists say they used HIV to make a gene therapy that cured eight infants of severe combined immunodeficiency, or “bubble boy” disease.” The scientists in question are a bit more oblique about it:

Continue reading Early days yet, but most common form of ‘Bubble boy’ disease appears… cured.

#rsrh An AIDS cure?

I see that I have gotten your attention.

Via RedState colleague Aaron Gardner comes this report from Germany suggesting that they’ve managed to kill the HIV virus.  As I have had it explained to me, German doctors treating a HIV-positive patient suffering from leukemia (immune system) with adult* stem cells taken from a donor with a particular mutation (one that offers a heightened resistance to the HIV virus).  After two transplants, the leukemia went into remission – and the HIV virus is no longer detectable in the patients bloodstream, after 3.5 years.

This is highly exciting news, but one caveat: this treatment involved first destroying the patient’s existing immune system via chemotherapy and radiation.  Which is better than dying, but it’s not really a treatment that’s currently amenable to mass production methods.  Still: possible first, easy later.

Moe Lane Continue reading #rsrh An AIDS cure?

DoJ: HIV transmission a *civil right*?

(Via InstapunditThis is a joke, right?  Surely not even this administration is going to let people die of AIDS – even if they’re convicts – by going after humane correctional policies designed to keep uninfected convicts from being infected while still providing the infected treatment and counseling.  Even if it does mean removing terminally ill, infectious convicts from the general prison population.  That’s just not right.

Some states long ago implemented policies to protect the uninfected part of the prison population while providing exceptional medical treatment and counseling to the infected population.

In South Carolina, it has worked so well since 1998 that there has only been a single transmission of HIV/AIDS to a noninfected prisoner. All that may change, however, thanks to a threat from Eric Holder’s Justice Department.

South Carolina received a letter from the now-infamous Civil Rights Division that the policy of keeping infected inmates at a designated facility, instead of scattered across the state in the general prison population, may unfairly stigmatize infected prisoners. To the Obama political appointees in the Civil Rights Division, this constitutes discrimination under the Americans With Disabilities Act.

But apparently that’s going to be policy.  At least, if the White House has its way. Continue reading DoJ: HIV transmission a *civil right*?