VOA常速英语:攻克HIV取得新进展：第二例患者痊愈

Scientists have been searching for a cure for HIV AIDS for close to 40 years. Those leading the fight against AIDS at the UN called the news that a British man has been functionally cured of HIV, a breakthrough. The breakthrough gives us great hope for the future, but also shows how far we are from the point of ending AIDS with science as well as the absolute importance to continue to focus on HIV prevention and treatment efforts. The London man is HIV free. After receiving a stem-cell transplant from a donor with a rare genetic mutation, one that made him resistant to HIV, the patient is now off HIV treatment.

We wait 16 months before stopping in the post-transplant period just to make sure that the cancer was in remission. The patient was well. And that the measures we had of the HIV reservoir in the body showed that there was very very little virus there, if any at all. Gupta hesitates to call it a cure, but he says it’s significant. This is the second patient to show no sign of the HIV virus after a similar stem cell transplant. The first was an American man, treated in Berlin 12 years ago. If you transplant those cells into somebody who already has HIV, you may protect those new cells from from infection. But stem cell treatment is not a practical cure for the 37 million people across the globe who have HIV. It’s expensive and finding a match with that genetic mutation is difficult. The procedure itself is painful and risky.
Having a bone marrow transplantation is a very complicated process. It requires an entire new set of cells to be taken into it into the person who’s having the treatment, and that again is a process where whilst those cells are embedding your very impact risk of getting infections and potentially dying. Both the London and Berlin patients had cancer and had no other choice but to take that risk. The second success has fueled optimism. We now have reason to believe that the Berlin patient was not a one-off case, meaning it is possible to nearly or maybe even completely eliminate HIV from the body of an infected person. Scientists will continue to search for other ways to cure HIV, but now they know it can be cured or at least put into remission.
Carol Pearson, VOA News Washington.