An HIV patient with leukemia appears to have no detectable traces of HIV in his blood after getting a transplant of stem cells from a donor carrying a rare gene variant known to resist the disease, according to a report published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The 42-year-old American living in Germany received the transplant to treat his leukemia, not the HIV itself.
But, it appears the transplant has wiped out the deadly disease.
The death toll from Zimbabwe’s tenacious cholera epidemic rose by 24 to 2,225 from a total of 42,675 cases, the World Health Organization said Friday in a statistical update.
Notes to the report compiled through Thursday hinted at the difficulties facing authorities trying to bring the persistent epidemic to a halt. Cholera treatment centers are having trouble ensuring supplies of clean water, as in Makonde and Zvimba, Mashonaland West province.
GENEVA (AP) — The United Nations says the death toll from Zimbabwe’s cholera outbreak has risen to 2,106.
The World Health Organization says more than 40,448 people have been infected by the disease since the outbreak began in August.
The figures released Wednesday by WHO show that the fatality rate for the newly added cases stands at 12.6 percent. The average fatality rate from cholera in Zimbabwe is at 5.2 percent. Both are far above the 1 percent considered normal in large-scale outbreaks.
President Robert Mugabe said today that “there is no cholera” in Zimbabwe any more because the country’s doctors had cured the outbreak.
His statement is in stark contradiction of the daily updates on the state of Zimbabwe’s cholera epidemic from the World Health Organisation, which said today that at least 783 had died of the disease and 16,403 had been infected as of yesterday.
GENEVA : Cholera has killed 412 people in Zimbabwe to date and the disease is also spreading into neighbouring Botswana and South Africa, the United Nations warned Friday.
A total of 9,908 cases have been recorded in the impoverished southern African country, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said, raising an earlier toll of 389 dead out of 9,463 affected.
WAMENA, Indonesia (AFP) — Gaunt and covered in sores, 20-year-old Christina Mabele is a rarity in the ballooning AIDS crisis that has hit the remote Papua region in eastern Indonesia: she knows why she is sick.
Sitting in a hospice in this highlands town, which much of the time is only accessible to the outside world by plane, Mabele might get treatment in time.
Twenty-five years ago, a diagnosis of AIDS was a nearly immediate death sentence.
But now that patients with the AIDS virus are living longer, doctors are discovering a new set of complications: People with HIV have a much higher risk of developing certain cancers — lung, liver, head and neck, to name a few — and doctors fear a cancer epidemic among this group could be coming.
Researchers in Maryland, home to one of the nation’s largest AIDS populations per capita, are among the leaders in an effort to solve what has become something of a medical mystery.
The World Health Organization said Friday that 294 people had died in a cholera outbreak in Zimbabwe, fostered by the country’s collapsing health care system. Fadela Chaib, an organization spokeswoman, said 6,072 cases of cholera had been reported since August, with a surge in the past two weeks.
SANTIAGO, Chile — Chile’s health minister said Thursday that the country’s public health system had failed to notify at least 512 people that they were infected with H.I.V., and that private-sector services did not inform an additional 1,364 that they were carrying the virus, which causes AIDS.
Speaking to lawmakers in Santiago, the health minister, Álvaro Erazo, said that in about half of the cases there was no evidence that anyone tried to reach the patients. “There is no justification for that,” Mr. Erazo told members of Chile’s Congress.
The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is a pathogen so wily and protean that researchers rarely talk about curing infected patients, focusing instead on treatment and prevention. But in an announcement that caused a flutter of excitement and a wave of prudent skepticism, Berlin-based hematologist Gero Huetter claimed on Thursday that he has cured an HIV infection in a 42-year-old man through a bone-marrow transplant.
