Sociologist's AIDS Network

Since HIV and AIDS were first identified in the Eighties as a threat to human health and welfare, the focus has been on preventing the spread of infection, treating sufferers, and discovering a remedy for the disease. Though various treatments have been developed over the previous few a long time that have basically extended a person's lifespan in addition to inhibit the spread of the illness from one infected individual to a non-contaminated individual, a cure for the disease has remained elusive. There are a number of reasons for this.

One of many causes the cure for HIV/AIDS has been difficult to obtain is due to the complexity in defining what it means to treatment the disease. Having a clear definition is necessary for figuring out if a treatment has achieved the objective. The simplest and best definition of a cure would be a cessation in the want for a affected person to use antiviral medicine in an effort to hold the HIV an infection beneath control. This does not essentially mean that the disease is eradicated but simply that the patient does not must take treatment anymore. Whole elimination of the disease, while a worthy purpose, is much more troublesome to measure since that might imply doing a prohibitively giant amount of testing on an individual to determine if there is any residual HIV infection in their body.

One other barrier to creating a remedy to HIV/AIDS is patient safety. There may be some concern that the remedy could trigger extra medical problems to arise. For example, one possible cure would contain activating dormant HIV which turns into latent throughout therapy with medications. The priority is that HIV activators would also activate other ailments that lay dormant in DNA resembling sure cancers genes thereby causing the remedy to be worse that the disease.

A third sensible barrier is the actual study and growth of the treatment itself. The illness is tough to study since HIV is a human disease and cannot be activated in different animals. The closest relation to HIV is Simian Immunodeficiency Virus (SIV) which occurs in monkeys. Nonetheless, the illness doesn't reply the HIV remedies meant for humans. Scientists have been capable of get round this to a certain extent but an accurate mannequin of the disease to check a possible remedy in animals still stays just out of reach. Despite these obstacles, although, quite a lot of progress has been made towards a treatment for the disease. Researchers are assured that one will likely be found especially if all of the wanted funding is poured into HIV/AIDS research from various governments in addition to the pharmaceutical industry.