This is great news!
On another note, does this mean reckless casual sex is back in style?
The #1 reckless casual sex thing you are referring to in which helps spread it is rape. No It hasn’t gone away or ‘fallen out of style’ sadly. Nor has used needles.
That’s cool, I prefer to watch from the closet while dressed as Superman, anyway. /s
While certainly an interesting development, this is just in a petri dish.
Every science article, every single one. They always make things sound like breakthroughs and I have to come in the comments to find out it’s bullshit or exaggerations. Why?
I think its to emphasize the importance of what seems small and boring out of context. Even though it may border on being misleading, I certainly would rather read extrapolations by informed journalists than be left not knowing which conclusions are important to me after reading a scientific publication.
Rtfm?
The headline is clickbait. The article ends with
“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.
I get more frustrated with articles like this than true clickbait. Here’s a genuine breakthrough in science, in an important health area: we should be excited, happy, inspired. Instead we’re annoyed by a misleading clickbait headline
Maybe view this stuff as a gradual accumulation not as a world changing event. As others ITT pointed out there was fuck all medical science could do about this disease in the era of Reagan Christians laughing about it. Now you can get it and live almost a normal life, provided you live in a wealthy country. The virus is dying not with a bang but with a whimper.
Here’s what’s interesting about this: HIV is a retrovirus. That means it integrates itself in your DNA. This approach edits the virus in your DNA. The downside is that, like most recombinant viruses, hiv mutates often. This would have to be tailored.
The other, bigger issue is that this only removes the virus in DNA. The virus RNA and packages to turn it into DNA and reinsert it need to be delt with before it can be cured.
In achieving a true cure, you would have to achieve both steps. Considering our previous success was to off all your bone marrow and replace it, this is a promising approach.
Bout time
I’m still impressed by the pills that stop infection. From epidemic to this all within a lifetime.
Fuck yeah science!