Chronicle “To the small care”
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The Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, an annual global meeting on AIDS research, has just been held in Seattle. Between the effects of announcements on the healing of a third patient and real progress, we take stock of research on this virus, with which 38 million people live.
Often at the end of an international congress on AIDS, the same question arises: what to remember? What information to keep? Those that look like a miracle or those that point to dead ends? This little dilemma arose quite naturally, last week, during the conference on retroviruses and opportunistic infections (Croi), a major annual meeting on AIDS and now also on Covid, which was held in Seattle, USA. As always, there were indeed a host of announcements, some sharp, others only media. Let’s try a first sort.
What regarding healing?
Even before the beginning of the congress, there was the announcement of a third case of cure of AIDS. Information designed by real pros of scientific communication, with good timing, launched with a lot of press releases, that the old one of the opening of the Croi, with publication in a major scientific journal.
It is a consortium, called, IciStem, which thus reported this new case of probable cure of HIV, this one following a bone marrow transplant from a donor carrying the CCR5Δ32 genetic mutation of the co- HIV CCR5 receptor, known to naturally protect once morest HIV.
The word cure is there, charged with all the symbols. But as HIV.org rightly notes, “as in the face of each case of cured