1. HIV-Positive Woman Becomes First to Donate an Organ
The old image of someone living with HIV is that they are sick — certainly too sick to help heal anyone else. But in 2019, Nina Martinez, 36, shattered that image. In March, Martinez became the first living person in the United States with HIV to donate a kidney. She was quickly followed in August by Karl Neumann. Martinez, who takes HIV medications that have rendered her HIV undetectable, did it to fulfill a promise to a friend who passed away from kidney failure before she could give him her kidney, she said. And she did it in part, she told Medscape, to “blow people’s minds.” The kidney was donated to another person living with HIV. Martinez, who describes herself on Twitter as “AIDS baby -> living kidney donor,” is also a marathon runner. By all accounts, she continues to do well after the donation. She reported on Twitter that she ran three-quarters of the Marine Corps marathon in 2019. She regularly posts videos and photos of pugs she finds adorable. And in December 2019, she tweeted, “I intend to continue to show people ‘the power of hope’ in 2020.” RELATED: First New HIV Strain Discovered in Nearly 20 Years
2. Stem Cells Put HIV Into Remission
HIV has been a disease that could be controlled since HIV medication became available in 1996. Today, it can stay in control if you remember to take your medicine every day. But no person with HIV had never been cured until 2008, when Timothy Ray Brown, the so-called Berlin patient (a name used at first to protect his identity), was cured after receiving a stem cell transplant for acute myeloid leukemia. The stem cells in question came from a donor with a unique genetic mutation that renders cells resistant to HIV. In 2019, another man, known as the London patient, received a similar procedure to treat Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The patient received stem cells with the same genetic mutation as those given to Timothy Ray Brown and also went into remission.That news, announced in March, led to headlines proclaiming a second man cured. With the excitement, though, came the letdown of the realization that stem cell transplants, while promising, come with side effects and high costs that make them a rare solution, unavailable for almost everyone living with HIV. (Both cures were the result of treatment the men required for cancer, which was tailored to the fact that they were also living with HIV.) Today, HIV doctor Melanie Thompson, MD, executive director of the AIDS Research Consortium of Atlanta, tells people that stem cell transplants are too risky for healthy people living with HIV. “I tell them that by taking their meds regularly, they can live a normal life span, have good sex, and not transmit HIV to their sexual partners,” she says. “This is the best possible message we can send for now.”
3. Scientists Confirm: U=U
“What’s U=U?” you may ask. Consider this headline, which ran in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet in May 2019: Successful treatment of HIV eliminates sexual transmission. The first U stands for “undetectable.” That means that when doctors peer into a microscope at the blood of someone living with HIV on effective treatment, the virus is just that — undetectable. Nowhere to be found. And because you can’t find it in the system, that means people who are undetectable don’t have enough virus in their system to pass it on to anyone else during sex. They are, in the parlance of activists, “untransmittable.” That’s the second U. Undetectable equals untransmittable, so U=U. It’s a revolutionary concept, says everyone from the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to people living with the virus themselves. In 2019, the data became irrefutable. After studies in heterosexual couples showed the same thing, scientists followed 972 homosexual male couples over more than 78,000 sexual encounters. In the couples, one man was living with HIV and an undetectable viral load, and the other wasn’t. They tested the HIV-negative partners for HIV, and none had acquired it from their partners. The findings were officially published in May 2019 in the journal The Lancet. RELATED: So Your Partner Is HIV Positive: Now What?
4. HIV Treatment Went Twofer
Last year also saw two-for-one treatment become an option for keeping people undetectable for the first time. Scientists had tried using only two drugs in the past, but it always had negative results: Someone’s treatment stopped working, or it never worked at all, and people got sicker. As a result, most people living with HIV take three or four HIV medications to keep their viral load undetectable. But in 2019, two different two-drug regimens for HIV emerged on the scene. The first, called Dovato, combines two HIV medications, dolutegravir and lamivudine, into a single pill people take once daily. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved it in April. The second, called Cabenuva (cabotegravir and rilpivirine), didn’t have quite the happy ending that Dovato had in 2019. Studies presented at HIV conferences showed the two-drug injection worked in both people who were already on other treatments and those new to HIV treatment. But the FDA denied approval for the medicine in December because of problems with manufacturing. Most experts expect it may still get approved. And what’s special about it, aside from controlling HIV with just two medications, is that it’s taken monthly. RELATED: Healthy Eating for People Living With HIV
5. A New Plan to End HIV in the U.S. by 2030
With all the technology and cutting-edge science available to us, you might ask why an estimated 38,000 Americans still acquired HIV in 2018 or why 6,000 people with HIV died from AIDS-defining illnesses in the United States in 2016. The answer, according to Anthony Fauci, MD, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is because an estimated 15 percent of Americans don’t know they have HIV, and people who either don’t know they have HIV or don’t have access to these life-saving treatment and prevention options are most likely to transmit HIV to others. In 2019, at the State of the Union address, President Donald Trump pledged to stop those new acquisitions of HIV and get everyone on treatment with an ambitious plan to end HIV in the United States by 2030. The plan is going into effect this year, with efforts to find people who have drifted out of care and get them back in care, as well as offering HIV prevention drugs to people who don’t have HIV but who live in 48 counties where more than half of all new HIV diagnoses happened in 2016 and 2017. RELATED: HIV/AIDS Awareness Month: December 2019
6. The City That Helps Americans With HIV Thrive
In 2014, a global partnership of Fast-Track Cities and municipalities around the world committed to accelerating their response to the HIV epidemic by dramatically improving people’s access to HIV prevention and treatment, and reducing HIV stigma. On World AIDS Day in 2019, New York City officials announced that people in New York City, once the epicenter of the AIDS crisis, were the most likely in the nation to know they have HIV, to be receiving effective treatment, and to be undetectable. California may soon follow the New York state model. RELATED: Can Turmeric Benefit Someone With HIV or AIDS?
