health
Monkeypox has proliferated on the planet since the year 2022 and mainly affected —although not exclusively— men who had homosexual relationships.
21/2/2023
A very severe form of monkeypox (monkeypox) was detected in patients with AIDS, according to a study published in recent days. “A severe and necrotizing form of mpox (could) become an AIDS-characteristic illness,” say the authors of this study that appeared in the popularization magazine Lancet.
This disease, which spread throughout the world in 2022 before reducing its expansion, mainly affected – although not exclusively – men who had homosexual relationships.
in bliss population there is a larger proportion of people infected with HIV, the virus that in its most advanced stage triggers AIDS, affecting the patient’s immune system and making it vulnerable to other diseases.
In this way, they identified a very serious form of the disease, which they described as “fulminant mpox”. This way, that It focuses on patients in whom HIV infection is in an advanced state, causing massive necrosis of the skin, genital parts, and lungs.
Of the total number of patients examined, 27 died. All of them had exceeded the generally accepted threshold for speaking of AIDS: less than 200 CD4 T lymphocytes per mm3 of blood.
These deaths represent a large part of the hundreds of deaths registered in the framework of the mpox epidemic, among several tens of thousands of cases.
For the researchers, these conclusions should prompt the health authorities to seek as a priority to vaccinate people affected by HIV against mpox. So they asked to add this severe form of the disease to the list of characteristic diseases of AIDS. The list includes about fifteen pathologies considered specifically dangerous in case of advanced HIV infection.
A third HIV patient is cured after a stem cell transplant
On the other hand, a study published this Monday in the journal Nature Medicine reported that a third HIV patient has managed to be cured after a stem cell transplant and that no trace of the AIDS virus remains in his body.
Before the case of the so-called Patient from Düsseldorf (West Germany), Two other HIV patients had managed to be cured, the first of them in Berlin in 2009 and the second in London in 2019.
According to the international consortium IciStem, this third patient had received a stem cell transplant as part of the treatment for leukemia.
The three patients who managed to be definitively cured of AIDS have the same point in common: they suffered from blood cancer and for this reason they were treated with a stem cell transplant, which profoundly renewed their immune system.
In all three cases, in addition, their donor had a strange mutation in the CCR5 gene, a genetic change that prevents HIV from entering cells.
“During a bone marrow transplant, the patient’s immune cells are fully replaced by donor cells, which makes it possible to eliminate the vast majority of infected cells,” explains virologist Asier Sáez-Cirion, one of the authors, in a statement. of the study.
“This is an exceptional situation when all these factors coincide for this transplant to be a double success, both for curing leukemia and for HIV,” he adds.
But because less than 1% of the population typically benefits from the protective HIV gene mutation, few stem cell donors have it.
Although these cases give scientists hope to find a cure for AIDS, a stem cell transplant is a risky treatment and one that is not adapted to the situation of the majority of HIV patients.
*With information from AFP.
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