Man "Cured" Of HIV May Not Be Cured

The famed Berlin man who was said to be cured of HIV after undergoing blood transplants for leukemia may still have the virus in his body.

[N]ew research presented on 8 June at the International Workshop on HIV & Hepatitis Virus "challenge[s] these results," asserts Alain Lafeuillade of the General Hospital in Toulon, France, a well known HIV/AIDS cure researcher. Lafeuillade issued a press release, "The So Called HIV Cured 'Berlin' Patient Still Has Detectable HIV in His Body," that questions whether Brown was reinfected and may still be infectious to other people. Lafeuillade also posted a blog item, "The Weird Story of the Berlin Patient," raising similar questions. The scientists who conducted the new study strongly object to Lafeuillade's interpretation of their results. "We weren't trying to say HIV was still there or he hadn't been cured," says virologist Steven Yukl of the University of California, San Francisco, who gave the talk.

(Tipped by JMG reader Nicholas)