Is Magic Johnson HIV Negative?

LOGIC wrote:

Well? Is he?

If you're that concerned just go get tested at your local health clinic. And next time tell him to wrap it!

I like the South Park where tey discover that Magic is having cash money injected diectly into his veins, therefore curing his HIV.

I heard he was negative a while back.

You don't think someone would've made a pretty big deal of Magic becoming the first person to overcome being HIV positive?

there was a big deal about it a few years back

There is a difference between being HIV negative and having no trace of it in your body. He still has it but it is at levels so low that they are undetectable. This is because the drugs he is taking are doing their job. If he stopped taking his medication or his body becomes resistant to the Meds he will still develop full blown AIDS.

dfdff wrote:

There is a difference between being HIV negative and having no trace of it in your body. He still has it but it is at levels so low that they are undetectable. This is because the drugs he is taking are doing their job. If he stopped taking his medication or his body becomes resistant to the Meds he will still develop full blown AIDS.

This is likely true though I'm sure he doesn't want to stop the meds to find out. It is true that his HIV has been below detectable levels for years now, and he appears healthy. It IS possible though that the drugs have rid his body of the virus; not likely but possible. Weirder things have happened. My own father is the first person ever to be "cured" (meaning 5 years cancer free) of a rare blood cancer. He benefited from early symptoms which lead to early treatment, and he's the first not only to be considered "cured" but also the first ever to have this particular cancer put into remission. Crazy.

I would say the odds of that are well below 1 in a billion flagpole. So yes it is possible, but it is also possible that I can fly.

waaaiiiit. If they are "undetectable" how do you know they are there?

dfdff wrote:

He still has it but it is at levels so low that they are undetectable. T

He is HIV negative but has not developed AIDS (which inevitably will kill you)

dfdff wrote:

I would say the odds of that are well below 1 in a billion flagpole. So yes it is possible, but it is also possible that I can fly.

No, it is NOT possible that you can fly. The human body isn't made to do that.

The odds are MUCH greater than 1 in a billion that Magic Johnson is HIV free. Just because something hasn't yet been confirmed doesn't mean it can't be or hasn't been done. I wouldn't want to test it if I were him, and it really wouldn't prove anything if he were HIV free, but when he's below detectable levels, you just can't tell for sure if he has the virus anymore or not.

I'm not sure that HIV can EVER be fully eradicated so much as the body may be able to repress it in a latent (dormant) phase. HIV is a retrovirus, an RNA virus that codes for a DNA transcript, which inserts itself into the human genome and exploits the cell's own machinery to start replicating, typically targeting new T-cells. It may be possible to contain it in the genome and relegate it to a dormant state, without being able to rid the body of it.

Cancer is a different deal, a rogue cell that proliferates and, with luck, can be eradicated from the body.

Wrong Flagpole.

No bird ever flew until the first one flew. Its called evolution.

It is possible that a "human" could be born that could fly.

No HIV Drug has successfully eradicated HIV.

NOVEMBER 7, 2008 A Doctor, a Mutation and a Potential Cure for AIDS

A Bone Marrow Transplant to Treat a Leukemia Patient Also Gives Him Virus-Resistant Cells; Many Thanks, Sample 61

By MARK SCHOOFSArticle

The startling case of an AIDS patient who underwent a bone marrow transplant to treat leukemia is stirring new hope that gene-therapy strategies on the far edges of AIDS research might someday cure the disease.

The patient, a 42-year-old American living in Berlin, is still recovering from his leukemia therapy, but he appears to have won his battle with AIDS. Doctors have not been able to detect the virus in his blood for more than 600 days, despite his having ceased all conventional AIDS medication. Normally when a patient stops taking AIDS drugs, the virus stampedes through the body within weeks, or days.

Sixten Koerper

Dr. Gero Hütter isn't an AIDS specialist, but he 'functionally cured' a patient, who shows no sign of the disease.

"I was very surprised," said the doctor, Gero Hütter.

The breakthrough appears to be that Dr. Hütter, a soft-spoken hematologist who isn't an AIDS specialist, deliberately replaced the patient's bone marrow cells with those from a donor who has a naturally occurring genetic mutation that renders his cells immune to almost all strains of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

The development suggests a potential new therapeutic avenue and comes as the search for a cure has adopted new urgency. Many fear that current AIDS drugs aren't sustainable. Known as antiretrovirals, the medications prevent the virus from replicating but must be taken every day for life and are expensive for poor countries where the disease runs rampant. Last year, AIDS killed two million people; 2.7 million more contracted the virus, so treatment costs will keep ballooning.

While cautioning that the Berlin case could be a fluke, David Baltimore, who won a Nobel prize for his research on tumor viruses, deemed it "a very good sign" and a virtual "proof of principle" for gene-therapy approaches. Dr. Baltimore and his colleague, University of California at Los Angeles researcher Irvin Chen, have developed a gene therapy strategy against HIV that works in a similar way to the Berlin case. Drs. Baltimore and Chen have formed a private company to develop the therapy.

Back in 1996, when "cocktails" of antiretroviral drugs were proved effective, some researchers proposed that all cells harboring HIV might eventually die off, leading to eradication of HIV from the body -- in short, a cure. Those hopes foundered on the discovery that HIV, which integrates itself into a patient's own DNA, hides in so-called "sanctuary cells," where it lies dormant yet remains capable of reigniting an infection.

But that same year, researchers discovered that some gay men astonishingly remained uninfected despite engaging in very risky sex with as many as hundreds of partners. These men had inherited a mutation from both their parents that made them virtually immune to HIV.

The mutation prevents a molecule called CCR5 from appearing on the surface of cells. CCR5 acts as a kind of door for the virus. Since most HIV strains must bind to CCR5 to enter cells, the mutation bars the virus from entering. A new AIDS drug, Selzentry, made by Pfizer Inc., doesn't attack HIV itself but works by blocking CCR5.

About 1% of Europeans, and even more in northern Europe, inherit the CCR5 mutation from both parents. People of African, Asian and South American descent almost never carry it.

Dr. Hütter, 39, remembered this research when his American leukemia patient failed first-line chemotherapy in 2006. He was treating the patient at Berlin's Charité Medical University, the same institution where German physician Robert Koch performed some of his groundbreaking research on infectious diseases in the 19th century. Dr. Hütter scoured research on CCR5 and consulted with his superiors.

Finally, he recommended standard second-line treatment: a bone marrow transplant -- but from a donor who had inherited the CCR5 mutation from both parents. Bone marrow is where immune-system cells are generated, so transplanting mutant bone-marrow cells would render the patient immune to HIV into perpetuity, at least in theory.

There were a total of 80 compatible blood donors living in Germany. Luckily, on the 61st sample he tested, Dr. Hütter's colleague Daniel Nowak found one with the mutation from both parents.

To prepare for the transplant, Dr. Hütter first administered a standard regimen of powerful drugs and radiation to kill the patient's own bone marrow cells and many immune-system cells. This procedure, lethal to many cells that harbor HIV, may have helped the treatment succeed.

The transplant specialists ordered the patient to stop taking his AIDS drugs when they transfused the donor cells, because they feared the powerful drugs might undermine the cells' ability to survive in their new host. They planned to resume the drugs once HIV re-emerged in the blood.

But it never did. Nearly two years later, standard tests haven't detected virus in his blood, or in the brain and rectal tissues where it often hides.

The case was presented to scientists earlier this year at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections. In September, the nonprofit Foundation for AIDS Research, or amFAR, convened a small scientific meeting on the case. Most researchers there believed some HIV still lurks in the patient but that it can't ignite a raging infection, most likely because its target cells are invulnerable mutants. The scientists agreed that the patient is "functionally cured."

Caveats are legion. If enough time passes, the extraordinarily protean HIV might evolve to overcome the mutant cells' invulnerability. Blocking CCR5 might have side effects: A study suggests that people with the mutation are more likely to die from West Nile virus. Most worrisome: The transplant treatment itself, given only to late-stage cancer patients, kills up to 30% of patients. While scientists are drawing up research protocols to try this approach on other leukemia and lymphoma patients, they know it will never be widely used to treat AIDS because of the mortality risk.

There is a potentially safer alternative: Re-engineering a patient's own cells through gene therapy. Due to some disastrous failures, gene therapy now "has a bad name," says Dr. Baltimore. In 1999, an 18-year-old patient died in a gene therapy trial. Even one of gene therapy's greatest successes -- curing children of the inherited "bubble boy" disease -- came at the high price of causing some patients to develop leukemia.

Gene therapy also faces daunting technical challenges. For example, the therapeutic genes are carried to cells by re-engineered viruses, and they must be made perfectly safe. Also, most gene therapy currently works by removing cells, genetically modifying them out of the body, then transfusing them back in -- a complicated procedure that would prove too expensive for the developing world. Dr. Baltimore and others are working on therapeutic viruses they could inject into a patient as easily as a flu vaccine. But, he says, "we're a long way from that."

Expecting that gene therapy will eventually play a major role in medicine, several research groups are testing different approaches for AIDS. At City of Hope cancer center in Duarte, Calif., John Rossi and colleagues actually use HIV itself, genetically engineered to be harmless, to deliver to patients' white blood cells three genes: one that inactivates CCR5 and two others that disable HIV. He has already completed the procedure on four patients and may perform it on another.

One big hurdle: doctors can't yet genetically modify all target cells. In theory, HIV would kill off the susceptible ones and, a victim of its own grim success, be left only with the genetically engineered cells that it can't infect. But so far that's just theory. All Dr. Rossi's patients remain on standard AIDS drugs, so it isn't yet known what would happen if they stopped taking them.

In 1989, Dr. Rossi had a case eerily similar to the one in Berlin. A 41-year-old patient with AIDS and lymphoma underwent radiation and drug therapy to ablate his bone marrow and received new cells from a donor. It is not known if those cells had the protective CCR5 mutation, because its relation to HIV hadn't been discovered yet. But after the transplant, HIV disappeared from the patient's blood. The patient died of his cancer 47 days after the procedure. Autopsy tests from eight organs and the tumor revealed no HIV.

This is an intriguing approach, essentially reconstituting the immune system with cells that no longer carry an altered receptor that HIV can utilize to "gain entrance." So, yes, technically that could be a way to "eradicate the virus," IF you successfully kill off the patient's own entire immune system first. Of course, it assumes you won't kill the patient in the process or HIV won't mutate to gain entrance another way or through the altered receptor. I'm not sure anyone knows fully the extent to which an infected body harbors HIV though. For example, could it hide in brain cells?

dfdff wrote:

Wrong Flagpole.

No bird ever flew until the first one flew. Its called evolution.

It is possible that a "human" could be born that could fly.

No HIV Drug has successfully eradicated HIV.

dfdff,

1) You go fly and then I'll admit I'm wrong.

2) You are correct that no HIV drug has successfully eradicated HIV. Gotta have proof for that. Right now Magic Johnson and lots of other people living with HIV are below detectable levels. Is he free of the virus? Well, we can't tell. Is it likely that he still has it? Yes.

3) I'll go with the viewpoint of my Stanford-educated Immunologist brilliant wife who used to do research on HIV when she tells me that it's possible the current crop of drugs could actually rid the body of HIV.

So, I'm not saying MJ is free of HIV...only that it's possible.