If you weren't alive in the 80s, it is hard to explain just what a massively earthshattering moment this is, now I know what it felt like to hear that,smallpox was preventable in real-time
Felt so many echos of that with Covid. A pandemic that the top of the exec branch refused to acknowledge even existed till so many bodies had piled up.
past tense? Covid not done with us! Many still can't go about their lives with any confidence of safety & people still dying & getting long covid (~1/10). Each case more & more harmful. Impacts brains, heart, vascular system-even mild cases. Could clean/vent air(#CovidisAirborne) but people go meh..
My professional life includes a time we couldn't include language recommending needle exchange for harm reduction/HIV prevention because it would be labeled soft on crime/drugs by a certain portion of the US electorate. To think I might live to see a cure is crazy.
I cannot fathom, after everything that's happened, that we might cure AIDS in my goddamn lifetime. If I think about it too hard I start to tear up just from the sheer size of it.
I mean, so, a) this is not a cure. This is a research breakthrough that could *lead to* a cure. It's a finding in a lab, not in people.
b) if you really want to lose your mind: HIV has already been cured in 3 people. It's just not an easily replicable cure/management through medication is easier.
Oh, wow! I lived through the worst of the AIDS epidemic in the Dallas gayborhood, Oak Lawn, 1989-92.
I remember a t-shirt that said, "All I want is a cure and all my friends back."
He must have known Ray Hill, the great former cat burglar, state prisoner, and human rights activist. Ray lived until just a couple of years ago, rabble-rousing with great success to the end.
I have a good friend, a woman, who spent her young adulthood in late 70s and 80s as That One Girl with all the gay male friends having the time of their collectively debauched lives.
She described this to me in the process, one night, of telling me how she buried the last of them in 1993.
And people aren’t acting like this is a single move in a game with at minimum decades longer to go. Genetic engineering in vitro is a fundamentally different ball game than in vivo, and this is about as close to a cure as a car is to a mars rover.
I was an intravenous drug user in the mid nineties... it loomed so large 🙁
I'll never forget how disappointed the nurse at the clinic sounded when she told me I'd tested clean, her opinion was my teenaged risky self deserved this a punishment from God.
Cautiously optimistic about this.
Worth noting that the first patient who established viral control without therapy ("functional cure") was in 1998, by a different method (BMT). There were two 'Berlin patients' and one in London that are well documented.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_...
There is still a long way to go from "eliminating HIV from cells in a laboratory" to a medicine/vaccine reaching the market. With a lot of uncertainty on the way...
“While these preliminary findings are very encouraging, it is premature to declare that there is a functional HIV cure on the horizon,” the researchers say.
This happens with every new medical discovery - every damn one of them.
We're not expecting cures to be available tomorrow - that's ludicrous - we're joyous and appreciative of the successful research, and that's what you're yucking on.
Don't discredit the value of good incremental success.
Yes the one thing people have too much of is good news and optimism, if you hadn't been here to go Well Ackshully and debunk claims nobody made civilisation would have been unmoored completely
I remember when AZT became available and it was like wow we can finally treat it into a chronic disease instead of an automatic death sentence. The idea it might be actually *curable* combined with that potential vaccine... 🤯
I remember being shocked that there wasn't a bigger to do over PrEP and PEP becoming available. We have already come so much further than I ever expected for my lifetime.
