While COVID-19 variants and vaccines have dominated the realm of medical news over the past few years, the eradication of HIV has fallen under the radar as breakthrough after breakthrough emerges, thrusting the scientific community closer than ever before to bringing a defining end to the nearly 50-year global epidemic.
What It Is
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports “HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) is a virus that attacks the body’s immune system. If HIV is not treated, it can lead to AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome). There is currently no effective cure. Once people get HIV, they have it for life.”
Since its rapid emergence in the 1980s, the disease has spread worldwide. There are currently nearly 40 million people living with the disease. Even with new treatments and increasingly helpful prevention methods, there are still hundreds of thousands that die from HIV and AIDS every year, and millions of new cases reported globally — not including the countless cases that go unreported or never get discovered in areas with inadequate testing.
Junior nursing major Riley Rhodes said, “I am extremely hopeful that a cure to HIV/AIDS will be discovered. Unfortunately, mortalities from HIV/AIDS occur due to confounding diseases rather than the condition itself. Ultimately, I hope that equitable, well-designed studies continue to emerge regarding HIV research.”
The Societal Response
For decades, the HIV/AIDS epidemic has played a massive role in the history and culture of the LGBTQ+ community. The CDC reports that “gay, bisexual, and other men who reported male-to-male sexual contact are disproportionately affected by HIV. Social and structural issues — such as HIV stigma, homophobia, discrimination, poverty, and limited access to high-quality health care — influence health outcomes and continue to drive inequities.”
The disease created a rise in anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination that halted a significant amount of the civil rights progress following the Stonewall Riots in 1969. The discrimination grew during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, who failed to even publicly utter the word “AIDS” until over a year into his term.
While the stigma has decreased, it still exists. Even now, there are restrictions on members of the LGBTQ+ community who wish to donate blood.
However, the disease once dubbed “the gay plague” is taking on new forms in society. In 2021, England reported that 49% of new diagnoses were in straight people, compared to 45% in gay and bisexual men. This marks a shift in the HIV epidemic, one that many LGBTQ+ activists feel emphasizes the discrimination and stigma around the disease. For some, it appears as if government officials only started truly caring about getting rid of it completely when it became more of a threat for them.
Good News
While the numbers of infected people continue to rise, there is significant progress in the effort to eradicate the virus.
Late last year, Moderna had reported it was working on a vaccine for HIV. Just last month, the vaccine began clinical trials. “We are tremendously excited to be advancing this new direction in HIV vaccine design with Moderna’s mRNA platform. The search for an HIV vaccine has been long and challenging, and having new tools in terms of immunogens and platforms could be the key to making rapid progress toward an urgently needed, effective HIV vaccine,” according to a news release from Moderna.
In addition to this, it was reported Feb. 15 that an anonymous woman was cured of HIV, thanks to a novel treatment. NBC News explains that “This therapeutic process is meant to replace an individual’s immune system with another person’s, treating their cancer while also curing their HIV. First, physicians must destroy the original immune system with chemotherapy and sometimes irradiation. The hope is that this also destroys as many immune cells as possible that still quietly harbor HIV despite effective antiretroviral treatment. Then, provided the transplanted HIV-resistant stem cells engraft properly, new viral copies that might emerge from any remaining infected cells will be unable to infect any other immune cells.”
NBC News continues, saying, “It is unethical, experts stress, to attempt an HIV cure through a stem cell transplant — a toxic, sometimes fatal procedure — in anyone who does not have a potentially fatal cancer or other condition that already makes them a candidate for such risky treatment.”
The scientific community remains optimistic, but the fight isn’t over yet. “I think the advances on HIV have been tremendous,” HIV/AIDS researcher Dr. Carlos del Rio said in an interview with NPR. “The fact is that it used to be a death sentence. Nowadays, with effective antiretroviral therapy, you can get somebody with HIV to live essentially a normal life. But not only that – we know that people with HIV who receive antiretroviral therapy and have the virus suppressed don’t transmit to others. The advances in HIV have really turned this disease around, but we’re still trying to find — sort of the two holy grails: finding a vaccine and finding a cure.”