Medicine and Cures

By Kate Kelland LONDON, Nov 20 (Reuters) - A United Nations report said on Tuesday that eradicating AIDS was in sight, owing to better access to drugs that can both treat and prevent the incurable human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes the disease. An aim to eventually end the worldwide AIDS epidemic is not "merely visionary" but "entirely feasible", the report said. Success in fighting the disease in the past decade has allowed the "foundation to be laid for the eventual end of AIDS" by cutting the death toll and helping stabilise the number of people infected in the pandemic, UNAIDS said its annual report. Some 34 million people had HIV at the end of 2011. Worldwide, the number of people newly infected with the disease, which can be transmitted via blood and by semen during sex, is falling. At 2.5 million, the number of new infections in 2011 was 20 percent lower than in 2001. Deaths from AIDS fell to 1.7 million in 2011, down from a peak of 2....

The so-called Berlin patient is famously the only person in the world who has been cured of HIV. But he may soon have company. Two people in Boston also seem to be free of HIV after undergoing bone marrow transplants for cancer, just as the Berlin patient did five years ago. The crucial difference is that the Boston patients have not yet stopped taking anti-HIV drugs — although that may happen in the coming months. Harvard researchers got an enthusiastic response from an overflow crowd when they presented the first report on the patients at the19th International AIDS Conference in Washington, D.C. "As far as we've been able to measure, we can't find evidence of HIV infection in the patients' blood or blood plasma, and their antibody levels against HIV are dropping," Dr.Daniel Kuritzkes of Brigham and Women's Hospital told Shots. "The antibody evidence tells us there is little if any persisting HIV protein to trigger an anti-HIV response." Kuritzke...