Comment by hylaride
6 months ago
The ways the flu and HIV work are radically different. Most of the time your body can fight off the flu/colds, etc and once we do we're mostly immune. HIV specifically infects and then spreads by invading the body's white blood cells. You die because eventually it gets at all of them and you have no natural defences (full blown AIDS). Our body can't fight it off with our natural defences, no matter how well trained.
We've actually been able to "kill" the virus in our bodies with drugs for awhile. The "AIDS cocktails" first developed in the 1990s did work (but originally required constant pill taking, even all night and had bad side effects) eventually were iterated (via new drugs and new timed-release pills) into essentially a single, daily pill that will now keep your viral load to zero - meaning you can have unprotected sex and not spread the virus. In theory, you could give these pills to sex workers to take every day and its significantly reduce the risk of the virus establishing itself.
The issue with HIV is that it can settle and lay dormant in various places the drugs won't get to (herpes and chickenpox/shingles do a similar thing). So we can't technically cure it, outside of very extreme procedures - IIRC a bone marrow transplant has cured somebody, but that is a dangerous procedure that has a high enough mortality rate that we only do it for otherwise deadly cancers.
> In theory, you could give these pills to sex workers to take every day and its significantly reduce the risk of the virus establishing itself.
It's not a theory. This mode of HIV antiviral drugs use is called PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis), and it's used by millions of people. Including sex workers, LGBT people, etc.
Good to know! My spouse used to work in HIV treatment, but at the time they were only considering it's use as such.
I read that some other apes have the simian version of HIV (SIV) endemic in them and it doesn't kill them. Other apes don't typically have exposure and it gives them AIDS. This suggests that in the long term, a species can develop natural immunity.
IIRC there have always been these stories about HIV about these unusual cases where a rare set of humans actually beats the virus. (Googling, I found the term "elite controllers") The first time I remember reading of something like that was around 1996. It's always been discussed with cautious optimism as something needing more study. You could see TFA along these lines.
Yeah, I remember about some people being immune or at least have something that keeps them alive. This is true for a lot of viruses. Some people were resistant to the black death and most of us are their descendants, for example.
We can inject and train our body to produce antibodies, but the nature of HIV infection means (significantly) changing how our white blood cells are produced if they are going to be resistant, which is not trivial (and would likely mean actual DNA alterations with who knows what side effects). This is why an HIV vaccine is so difficult - it attacks and uses the body's immune system to spread.
The details are fuzzy, but I recall the avenue of those people's resistance/survivability being mostly a non-starter; the majority of them had a lot slower progression of the virus, not outright immunity.