I'm slightly skeptical--I mean, is it not at least *possible* that his initial tests results were wrong? The article says that there was no fault with the testing procedure, but couldn't paperwork have been misfiled or something?
If this is true, though, how incredibly cool!
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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I saw that article too and thought the same thing. If there was only one test done, I would bet on a false positive, particularly if he never showed symptoms.
I would be very, very happy if this turned out to be a true case of the body clearing HIV. I hope that studying this guy would lead to a cure. *Crosses fingers*
Posts: 3546 | Registered: Jul 2002
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Apparently, there are a few people who are, on the genetic level, more resistant to HIV than others. If I had to guess, I'd say that this guy is one of them.
Posts: 681 | Registered: Feb 2004
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There could of course be an error, but it sounds like they're fairly sure there were not any mistakes. For any disease, there will be people who have a greater capacity to fight and perhaps eliminate the pathogen. This is as true of AIDS as any other microbe-caused illness. The article discusses anecdotal evidence in Africa that has been accumulating for some time; I've heard a lot about these stories, and there are just too many to discount. My biology teachers always seemed to take it as a given that some people would in fact be able to survive for long, long periods of time with HIV without needing medication or developing AIDS and also that some people would be able to fight it off entirely. Natural selection in action!
Posts: 471 | Registered: Jul 2005
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Okay, now that I've had time to google my way into saying something vaguely intellectual, here's where I heard about people being resistant to HIV.
quote: Meanwhile, recent work with another disease strikingly similar to the plague, AIDS, suggests O'Brien was on the right track. HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, tricks the immune system in a similar manner as the plague bacterium, targeting and taking over white blood cells. Virologist Dr. Bill Paxton at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in New York City noticed, "the center had no study of people who were exposed to HIV but who had remained negative." He began testing the blood of high-risk, HIV-negative individuals like Steve Crohn, exposing their blood to three thousand times the amount of HIV normally needed to infect a cell. Steve's blood never became infected. "We thought maybe we had infected the culture with bacteria or whatever," says Paxton. "So we went back to Steve. But it was the same result. We went back again and again. Same result." Paxton began studying Crohn's DNA, and concluded there was some sort of blocking mechanism preventing the virus from binding to his cells. Further research showed that that mechanism was delta 32.
posted
I saw that show. I was under the impression that people with that mutation just couldn't be infected. I don't know...maybe people who are heterozygous can get infected, and then all the non-resistant T-cells die off, and the virus runs out of cells to infect? Or maybe it's another mechanism entirely.
Posts: 3546 | Registered: Jul 2002
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quote:There could of course be an error, but it sounds like they're fairly sure there were not any mistakes. For any disease, there will be people who have a greater capacity to fight and perhaps eliminate the pathogen. This is as true of AIDS as any other microbe-caused illness.
The difference, as I understand it, is that the HIV virus mutates to a new form to confound the immune system as soon as it's "discovered" by T-cells. The immune system has no problem killing off infections, but it's finding them that's the problem, since HIV effectively blinds it by infecting the cells it uses to detect intruders.
Clearly, this man has superpowers.
Posts: 3293 | Registered: Jul 2002
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There are 3 things that might explain this: * A false positive, originally * A false negative, now * He's cured.
I hope it's the last, and that he'll relent and let the doctors study him. But given the track record for curing AIDS so far (0%, to *all* decimal places), I won't assume this is what happened. We *know* that tests, including HIV tests, give false results sometimes.
Posts: 1877 | Registered: Apr 2005
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The last I heard Magic Johnson was no longer showing antibodies either, though they are not calling him cured. His doctors simply say the disease is at an undetectable level. A friend in med school said that there have been people who have seemed to recover from HIV after taking some of the more powerful (and expensive) drugs. The problem is, you never know when it will come back. Some people, like Magic Johnson go for years seemingly without the virus, some die quickly...and people who seem to be virus free can still sometimes infect others.
It seems odd the the BBC article is making such a big deal out of this. One test showed that the man didn't have the virus at detectable levels. This is not nearly as uncommon as they seem to think. Added to that is the fact that according to the article he never showed symptoms to start with.
Personally, there are other things that I find more interesting that the article didn't seem to focus on. It is rather strange that he was tested once (and showed a positive) but didn't get sick before being retested. Is it possible that the test was wrong the first time? They said that doctors claimed that there was no fault with their testing procedure, but could their standard procedure be wrong?
The article seems to be rather sensationalist, but it does come from the BBC, so I guess that is to be expected.
Posts: 1901 | Registered: May 2004
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quote:It is rather strange that he was tested once (and showed a positive) but didn't get sick before being retested.
That isn't strange at all, many people have HIV for years without symptoms. I met a patient last year who hasn't had a symptom in 10 years because he started drugs right away and his CD4 count has always been over 500.
As far as the claim itself, I'd have to know a lot more about the two testings he has had to have any opinion on it.
Edit: I suppose I should add, one doesn't GET symptoms just from having HIV. They get the symptoms of AIDS, Acquired Immuno Deficiency Syndrome, by being susceptible to organisms most of us fight off easily. Until the immune system starts to fail below a certain level, one doesn't have any symptoms at all.
quote:Originally posted by Lupus: The last I heard Magic Johnson was no longer showing antibodies either, though they are not calling him cured.
Since when do antibodies go away when an illness goes away? Antibodies are things in your body that fight disease. After the disease is gone, you still have antibodies so that you can fight the disease off if it comes again.
If someone had antibodies for a disease and they went away, that sounds like a serious problem.
Posts: 12266 | Registered: Jul 2005
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Actually, immunity CAN go away in cases of cleared viruses or other antigens. That's why, for example, adults get a tetanus shot every ten years, to remind the immune system to keep antibodies against tetanus.
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But antibodies going away isn't considered a good thing. It means that the body is losing a defense against illness.
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No, it means, in this case, that the body doesn't need those particular antibodies and is therefore shutting down production.
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quote:Originally posted by Theaca: That isn't strange at all, many people have HIV for years without symptoms. I met a patient last year who hasn't had a symptom in 10 years because he started drugs right away and his CD4 count has always been over 500.
true, but the guy in the BBC story never needed medication in the 14 month span. Though, I do wonder why he wouldn't have started taking the drugs when he tested positive.
Posts: 1901 | Registered: May 2004
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People diagnosed HIV positive don't begin taking medication immediately, as the medications have serious side effects and can lose effectiveness over time. There is a threshold CD4 count below which HIV+ patients begin medication.
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I am not sure what you are taking about, Theca.
I am talking about Lupus' question as to why the guy in the BBC story did not need HIV meds during the 14 months from the time he was diagnosed to the time he was declared free of the virus.
I wasn't talking about Magic Johnson. (I am guessing that's where the "10 years" remarks come from.)
Posts: 5771 | Registered: Nov 2000
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Sorry, ela, I was referring to my above post, the one that Lupus just quoted, where I mentioned the guy I knew that hasn't gotten AIDS 10 years after being HIV positive. That was the post you were responding to, I thought. The post before your first post.
Posts: 1014 | Registered: Jul 2005
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quote:true, but the guy in the BBC story never needed medication in the 14 month span. Though, I do wonder why he wouldn't have started taking the drugs when he tested positive.
posted
Hmm, so I guess the most interesting thing about this guy, if the story is accurate, is that he appears to have contracted HIV (as evidenced by a positive anitbody test), received no treatment, and now tests negative for HIV. There are documented cases of people being exposed to HIV and never contracting it or developing antibodies - yes? So that's the difference? This guy developed antibodies and subsequently beat the virus, whereas other people who are "immune" (incorrect usage, but gets the point across) to AIDS never develop antibodies at all?
Posts: 471 | Registered: Jul 2005
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No, from the articles I've read, all I see is that a known-to-show-false-results preliminary screening test was done, maybe. And the dude refused to take the highly accurate confirmational test. Or for that matter, even a repetition of the screening test to make sure that the diagnosis was not due to a mixup in samples. Then 14months later, he agrees to a second test, which shows clear. And his first action is to try to sue.
Which brings to my mind, fraud: ie he knew that the result on the first test wasn't about his tissue. Otherwise, why wouldn't he have wanted an immediate confirmation of the screening test? It wouldn't have been hard to obtain a sample from someone with HIV, then switch samples -- or to use the HIV-infected sample to contaminate his own sample -- while the technician was distracted.
It ain't even that hard to distract someone: UriGeller made a career of "psychicly" bending spoons in front of "skeptical" witnesses. Heck, I was able to pull off the trick after my first viewing of it on television, though I've never been into prestidigitation. Magician&"psychic"debunker JamesRandi has demonstrated many times that it's easy to distract&fool even expert witnesses, as long as they aren't trained magicians*. Especially if they expect honesty from the person they are observing.
Why would a technician expect/suspect that a person coming in for an HIV test would want to foul up the result?
* UriGeller couldn't bend spoons during his appearance on the TonightShow : host JohnnyCarson was also a magician.
posted
While distracting the viewer, bend it against a hard surface or on a hard corner, then straighten. The stress of the original bending deforms the crystaline structure, weaking the metal, and it gets easier and easier to bend after each bending. In the case of a spoon, being bent&straightened once is sufficient to weaken the metal enough to bend easily from "rubbing" between thumb and fingers.
Which is how I knew what Geller was doing: spoons bent while scooping overly cold ice cream from the container at home. And once it's been bent, the spoon is so pliable that it's pretty much useless for scooping ice cream again.
posted
I'm confused about why this is even a news story. Fifteen years ago the same thin happened to a guy I knew in Seattle. He we a nurse who had been exposed to HIV containing fluids. He was found and confirmed to be HIV positive. Then two years later, his blood test came up HIV negative. Additional tests were run, and he was indeed HIV negative.
I don't know the statistics, I'm quite certain that such occurances are relatively common so long as the individual has never shown any AIDS symptoms. They are usually explained as "false positives".
Posts: 12591 | Registered: Jan 2000
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I've used some really poorly designed ice cream scoops. Could this be considered support for ice cream scoop evolution or evidence for the existence of a stupid designer.
I'm a big proponent of SD theory.
Posts: 12591 | Registered: Jan 2000
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I've often wished that inanimate objects could mate . . . you could get Hummer/ sports car crosses, and ice cream scoop/ potato peelers in your kitchen drawer. *sigh*
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