Nature reports drug-free approach to HIV

The results of the start-and-stop therapy, though applicable to only a tiny subsection of AIDS patients, intimates that an HIV vaccine might be possible, the WSJ report, authored by this year’s Pulitzer prize winning journalist Mark Schoofs said.

The finding by Dr Walker is an offshoot of the celebrated case of the Berlin Patient, in which a young German stopped taking medicine against his doctor’s advice and seemed to control his virus. Dr Walker’s team studied the patient’s immune system. What they found encouraged Dr Walker to proceeed with the study, the first to take patients off drugs, said Schoofs.

The subjects in Dr Walker’s study were treated very soon after they contracted HIV, in most cases within a month. Explaining the results, quoting Nature, it says that in these few lucky patients, HIV hasn’t had the time to destroy the critical components of the immune system. What Walker’s team apparently did was to preserve defences which these patients still had in place. In patients infected for months or years, researchers face a much harder task of regenerating something lost.

Dr Walker and Eric Rosenberg, the principal investigator on the study, say that they fear that many patients won’t make this critical distinction and will stop taking their medications. The method used on the study subjects has so far failed to achieve the same results when tried on patients who have carried the virus in their bodies for months or years, the report says.

Another limitation of the study is the durability of the effect of the stop-drug therapy. “The patients in the study have been controlling the HIV for less than a year. We cannot say what the durability of this effect is. Our patients know we are considering this a honeymoon period,” says Walker.

The finding echoes the assertions of many AIDS scientists against intake of toxic drug cocktails and their reservations about the very theory of an HIV virus. In fact, a group in the US called Alive and Well, which was started by an HIV-positive person, Christine Maggiore, advocates against using drugs for HIV and AIDS. Maggiore rejected her test and stopped her drugs and went ahead to have a baby. Supported by music band Foo Fighters and featured in the magazine Newsweek last month, the group says that there is no evidence that HIV causes AIDS or that there is an HIV virus. It also says that HIV tests do not test for virus but for antibodies which are in millions in the body and could be generated by conditions as varied as a fever to pregnancy.