by Alicia M Prater PhD

Created on: October 09, 2007

Due to the nature of HIV itself, I think there will never be a cure. There will be new strides in treatment as we discover new things about its structure and weaknesses. We will have new therapies that keep an HIV positive diagnosis from being a death sentence. We may even glimpse research that finds ways to lower the viral load. But the key to ridding ourselves of HIV infection is still prevention. Don't let your guards down with promises of vaccines and cures, you are still the best line of defense to protect yourselves!

HIV is a virus. It mutates with nearly every replication because the viral enzyme responsible for encoding new strands is not reliable. The strain of HIV can change over the course of an individual's infection and as medications attack it. It is known that if a person is on HIV medications they can not miss a treatment or else it gives the virus time to mutate and adapt, thus needing a change in treatment regimen. HIV is now becoming resistant to the popular HAART treatment that was heralded as the end of AIDS so few years ago. Individuals are becoming infected with multiple strains that benefit from various host cells, needing a treatment that isn't specific, but general. A cure would have to take into account every strain in every cell in every environmental context. That would be impossible.

Once HIV infects a cell it can lie dormant for decades. Any treatment that eliminates HIV from the body would have to be taken long enough, over the course of a lifetime, to get every viral particle. HIV is not like other common viruses, it has reservoirs in the immune system. When an individual harboring dormant HIV, even if active HIV was cleared by a medication years before, becomes ill with something else, the common cold even, those cells will turn on and HIV will be born again.

HIV isn't the only virus like this. Chickenpox (varicella virus) can lie dormant in the basal root ganglia, nerve cells, and be reactivated under the right immune conditions to produce shingles. Hepatitis C is a chronic infection of the liver that can only be cured by a transplant. Depending on the type the individual is infected by, Herpes simplex reactivates into cold sores or genital lesions under the right host conditions. We have a world full of viruses that we have learned to live with, but now we have one that we can't suppress. It's time we admit that prevention and education is the only way.

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