All HIV positive people can be cured by a bone-marrow transplant. That’s not even an issue, you just need a donor that is a good match for you and also carries the mutation that makes them naturally immune to an HIV infection. This isn’t as hard as it sounds.
On average there should be 1 donor with an adequate match for you in a group of 30–60 thousand randomly chosen people and the mutation that grants you immunity to HIV occurs at about 1% of (Caucasian) population. That means all you need is to collect the data for 3–6 million donors and you can cure anyone. If just USA, EU, UK Canada, Japan, South Korea and a few others pooled their resources together it wouldn’t even be an issue.
Really. This is entirely without sarcasm, it is eminently possible to do so. So why it’s not being done? Because an allogenic bone marrow transplant is the single worst medical procedure out there.
No, not because of the needles. This is just the donor anyway, he’ll be fine. It is the recipient who suffers beyond measure.
Allogenic bone marrow transplant has a death toll of about 20%, it takes six months to recover enough to resume something close to normal life but you’re likely to be permanently weakened by the ordeal. To speak nothing about how you feel when your body is blasted with enough radiation and flushed with toxic chemicals to destroy your own bone marrow. It’s chemo, but unlike your regular chemo it needs to be dosed sufficiently to penetrate all the way into the bone. You have 80% chance to live through the week or so this needs, plus another month to get the new bone marrow up and running.
This is if all goes well, if there are no complications and you don’t suffer from a pulmonary infection from something you thought was completely benign because even a limited immune system easily deals with various spores, but you go without for a week or so. People die of that, or are left with other permanent injuries.
If you make it through that you have a lifelong risk of Graft-Versus-Host Disease, when your new immune system begins to recognize the rest of the body as an enemy and begins to attack it. It can be managed sure … but with serious side-effects. 15% of all recipients succumb to GVHD - this is on top of 20% who don’t survive in the first place.
I know a few people who have gone through it who said if they knew beforehand what they were getting themselves into they’d have chosen death instead. None of them had any complications after the graft, it was just the baseline procedure to have your own bone marrow destroyed and replaced.
Taking a few pills daily is the easy, cheap option for managing HIV.
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