Sunday, November 9, 2008

Health: HIV patient cured with Bone Marrow Transplant

What would you call it-a miracle,magic or a bonus life gifted by the Almighty?It could be anything,but the fact is the patient is still in better condition now than he was a few months back.



As we know until now, HIV has no cure and has led to the deaths of over 25 million people.But Dr. Gero Hütter, 39--a brilliant physician in Germany , is the new hero who found out an AIDS cure, and the most astonishing thing is he is not an AIDS expert. He treated a 42-year-old American living in Berlin who had leukemia and needed a bone marrow transplant.



After a successful surgery, the patient is recovering but seems to be free from AIDS as well. Doctors have not been able to detect the HIV virus that causes AIDS in his blood stream for more than 600 days even after the patient stopped taking AIDS medications. The doctors said when a patient stops taking AIDS medication; the virus generally regenerates very rapidly, within weeks or days. However, they were amazed not to see any of it in the patient.The Doctor himself was surprised seeing the result when he replaced the patient's bone marrow cells with those from a donor who had a naturally occurring genetic mutation that renders his cells immune to almost all strains of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

If this method is successful for other patients, this type of gene therapy technique will be much better than the regular AIDS treatment which is quite expensive for patients and if this therapy technique works, then it will save thousands of lives.









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