Can AIDS be Cured?

The 19th International AIDS Conference was held last week in Washington, DC. The Economist reports that the question being whispered around the conference was "Can AIDS be Cured?" This is obviously a titillating headline, but the story makes it clear that we may still be a few scientific breakthroughs away from being able to answer 'yes' to that question.

The conference’s formal business was to keep up the momentum behind the most successful public-health campaign of the past 30 years: the taming, at the cost of a few pills a day, of an infection that was once an inevitable killer. It still kills. About 1.7m people succumbed last year. But that figure is down from 2.3m in 2005 (see chart 1), and is expected to continue falling. Now, therefore, some people are starting to look beyond the antiretroviral (ARV) drugs which have brought this success. They are asking if something else could do even better.

As The Economist notes, the problem with the ARVs is that they don't get rid of the virus, they just keep it in hiding, so you have to stay on the medication all of your life, and that is very expensive.

A race is therefore on to work out how to flush the virus from its hiding places and get rid of it completely. Several clues suggest a cure may be possible. But no one knows which route will lead to it.

In the meantime, the disease continues to spread, even in the US, as noted in a recent story in the Charlotte Observer:

What 30 years ago was a disease that primarily affected white gay men now has a significant effect on far more populations, including gay and bisexual black and Latino men and heterosexual black women. And while HIV was, and still is, considered a big-city problem, it affects impoverished rural communities at an alarming rate, especially in the Deep South.
According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, blacks are eight times more likely to contract HIV than whites are. Black women are 15 times more likely to become infected than white women. Black youths are 10 times more at risk for HIV than their white counterparts are.
Latinos don't fare that much better. The nation's fastest-growing and largest minority population - at 16 percent - is infected with HIV at a rate three times that of whites.

The fact that people with HIV no longer have a nearly automatic death sentence does not diminish the importance of seeking a cure nor of continuing to push for prevention, including circumcision and using condoms. 

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2012/07/26/3407941/what-science-cant-yet-treat-hivs.html#storylink=cpy