Hat tip to La Lioness Priyanka for
her similar thread earlier, but I wanted to be able to go at it and explain WHY this is the case in greater detail.
First, why it's false. One of the most important principles in scientific inquiry is reproducibility of results. You might be able to create something in a lab, but if you can't reliably reproduce it, it's useful only for academic research, not real world application.
In this case, the "cure" involved one man getting a bone marrow transplant from a donor with a genetic mutation known as CCR5-Delta32. CCR5-Delta32 is a gene which is most prevalent in people of northern European descent, because people with this gene have an increased natural resistance to certain diseases including bubonic plague, smallpox, and HIV. The belief is that the bone marrow in the man's body produced new blood cells which were immune to HIV, thus causing the virus to die out when it could no longer attack his blood cells.
The fact that this therapy "cured" one person is good for that person, but it is no guarantee that the same thing would work for another person. Even if it worked for multiple people, the scientists themselves say it cannot work universally, to cure everyone infected. And since this "cure" is based on finding an extremely rare type of bone marrow match, the chances of it being applied on even a mid-level scale is virtually non-existant.
So to say that this is a "cure" for HIV or AIDS is false and misleading. It's an interesting data point, and it may eventually contribute to us finding more effective treatments and preventions, but it is not even close to a cure.
Second, why it's dangerous. One of the trends we've seen in recent years is, after having plateaued at one point during the height of campaigns for HIV awareness and safe sex, a rise in the rate of new HIV infections. Many researchers attribute this to the creation of Highly-Active Anti-Retroviral Therapy and other anti-HIV/AIDS medications, because uninformed and underinformed people think of these as a "cure" for HIV/AIDS, or at the very least they serve to mitigate the public perception of the danger from HIV infection. As a result, people are less vigilant, and more likely to engage in unprotected sex, more people contracting the disease, and fewer people being careful enough to get tested.
This isn't just something dumb people do. I personally know someone who was diagnosed with AIDS a little over a year ago, after very nearly dying--he had a CD4 cell count of four, versus a viral load of about one million. He didn't find out he was infected until he reached the state known as "HIV-Associated Dementia." For those who don't know, imagine the virus getting so bad that, as it begins to attack your nervous system, it induces a delusional state akin to LSD on steroids. As a smart guy and an activist in the gay community, he should have known better than to get in that situation, either by getting infected or not knowing about it. He still took the risks.
The belief by the public that there is a "cure" for HIV can and will result in people, even smart people who know better, taking risks that they should not and would not if they were appropriately worried about infection. I understand people don't want to live in fear. But a little healthy fear is good for you. It makes you buckle up when you go out, eat healthy when you don't want to, and put the condom on even when you don't feel like it.
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