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Groundbreaking treatment has officially been conducted in a recent case of HIV. NBC News reports that an American research group may have cured HIV in a woman for the first time ever. Now, the patient has entered a rare club made up of three men who have been cured, or close to being cured, of the disease. Building on past success within the field of HIV research, scientists were able to use a cutting-edge stem cell transplant method anticipated to expand across more patients with HIV in the foreseeable future. With this huge leap toward a cure for a disease that has plagued the U.S. since 1981, the director of the Division of AIDS at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Carl Dieffenbach, notes that the latest progression “continues to provide hope.”
Raniyah Copeland of the Black AIDS Institute can remember a time when HIV — the virus that causes AIDS — was the scourge of the 1980s. She remembers when the virus wiped out a whole sub-population of Black and Latinx men — she remembers what they faced while they were alive — and she knows that while HIV isn’t the scourge it once was, it’s still a disease that disproportionately affects the Black community…and she knows why. “In the United States, health is driven by inequity,” she told AfroTech. “HIV, as a disease, has a unique stigma in that it’s associated specifically with certain sexuality, a certain race, and a certain socio-economic class. While society isn’t as overt with its racism about AIDS as it once was — there was a time when the CDC would say that being Haitian, for example, made you more susceptible to AIDS — we still have progress that needs to be made.” Progress is, ultimately, the goal of the Black AIDS Institute. Dedicated exclusively to eradicating the disease...