Adult stem cell therapy cures AIDS
Even as Barack Obama prepares to reward his liberal university friends by opening public coffers to fund new labs fronted by futile and morally bereft human embryo experimentation comes this news from Germany, as reported by the Wall Street Journal and Reuters:
The startling case of an Aids patient who was cured after undergoing a bone marrow transplant to treat leukemia is stirring new hope that researchers might someday find a cure for Aids….
The patient, a 42-year-old American living in Berlin, is still recovering from his leukemia therapy, but he appears to have won his battle with Aids. Doctors have not been able to detect the virus in his blood for more than 600 days, despite his having ceased all conventional Aids medication. Normally when a patient stops taking Aids drugs, the virus stampedes through the body within weeks, or days.
“I was very surprised,” said the doctor, Gero Hütter.
The breakthrough appears to be that Dr Hütter, a soft-spoken hematologist who isn’t an Aids specialist, deliberately replaced the patient’s bone marrow cells with those from a donor who has a naturally occurring genetic mutation that renders his cells immune to almost all strains of HIV, the virus that causes Aids.
The reality, once again, is that adult stem cells have been treating patients for decades, and almost every day now there is another breakthrough. Let’s see where AIDs activists now demand where the money is spent.
[Photo of Gero Hütter courtesy of Reuters]
Jill Stanek is a nurse turned speaker, columnist and blogger, a national figure in the effort to protect both preborn and postborn innocent human life.
Wow! That is wonderful! I hope that this man (and others) will be truly cured through this ASCR.
Your title is incorrect. This wasn’t adult stem cell therapy. This was a bone marrow transplant. It had nothing to do with any kind of stem cell therapy.
Here is a link with a little more information:
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hwlpMzO2z0voECw2T4MfOPkOEXNAD94DSGLG0
Actually, Correction, it is the stem cells in the bone marrow that, when tranplanted, replaces the recipient’s own marrow.
I have not seen an actual bone marrow transplant in many years. Typically, stem cells are taken from the donor in an apheresis process similar to platelet or plasma donation, then transfused into the recipient. However, perhaps in the German hospital they are still doing BMTs. Regardless of which procedure was used, it was the stem cells – either from the donor’s bone marrow or peripheral blood – that repopulated the patient’s own marrow.
What the F?
Obama doesn’t have any education in medicine. This article on bone marrow transplant is not connected to harvesting embryos for stem cells.
Bone Marrow is technically more like Adult stem cells.
This is good news towards a cure, if it works.
I cannot imagine why this is not the front page headline of every newspaper in America. Not even Drudge has this story linked.
We actually reported on this on Tuesday. It is great news no matter how you look at it.
Amie,
What’s with this story? A little one-sided, no?
http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2008/11/07/a-referral-you-dont-want
sheesh, that article is very one sided and nasty.
Sounds like typical pro abortion as the only choice type article. There was one in the university newspaper (I read the article online) a year ago about. It was very one sided and attacking CPC because they don’t refer for abortion. Or because they emphasis chastity or abstinence.
BTW, the fetal models are very accurate because there are advances in science that has helped them create the models.
thank-you to the moderator who removed my post!
my daughter saw the stem cell post and couldn’t resist.
she said what she learned in gr 11 biology class concurs with what Polly wrote.
How embarassing the rest of the world’s scientists are leaving us in the dust. While we still waste time and resources on ESCs the Chinese, Thais, Portugese, S.Koreans, and now the Germans are successfully treating disease, paralysis, and genetic disorders with ASCs.
American citizens, including the late Hawaiian performer Don Ho, have to travel to distant countries to get treatment.
Why aren’t we the leaders in this research?
Because we have a little thing called the FDA.
Rae,
True. Exactly what one expects from a corrupt and useless institution.
I still can’t understand why with these successes worldwide, our scientists would be wasting time and energy on ESCs. They’re yesterday’s news.
RH Reality Check is the most abortion-hungry site on the web. That dopey article on CPCs gets recycled in one form or another every couple of months. They kind of let the cat out of the bag this time around, though:
There are as many as 4,000 of them [CPCs] in the U.S. (twice as many as the number of abortion providers)
Hmmm. Why is the relevant comparison to abortion providers? I thought all they wanted was for college freshwomen to go to “reproductive healthcare centers” to explore all their options.
Surprise! It’s all about abortion, abortion, abortion.
http://pagingdrgupta.blogs.cnn.com/2008/11/14/not-the-cure-for-aids/
Yeah. This isn’t a “cure”, nor is it feasible. HIV is capable of living in cells other than lymphocytes, but I believe it only really replicates in lymphocytes.
The other issue is, that they purposely found a bone marrow match that had a specific mutation in one of the receptors necessary for HIV to enter lymphocytes. These individuals still have HIV antibodies (and are therefore considered HIV+) but have no replicating HIV because the HIV cannot get into the lymphocytes. These individuals are usually called “long-term non-progressors”, because they come up as HIV+ but never develop full-blown AIDS.
It is amazing how the prolifers on these pages will not fully identify themselves. What are they afraid of? I have had naziesque letters (anonymous, of course) sent to my home, had every possible hate word leveled my way. You name it. I’ve been called treasous, antiBush (well, isn’t everyone?), and, naturally, every swear in the book. Funny thing to: most of these letter writers claim to be christian.
By the way, no one, but no one is going to take away from me or any woman I know the right to a medical doctor performing a safe abortion.
Michael, I’m sorry that you have received those types of letters. We get them too. It seems there are crazies across the political spectrum.
We tend to go by our first names, but everyone knows that Jill posts under her full name, and most of us here also know each other’s last name. We’re not trying to hide our identities. In fact, if you look to the right of the screen there’s a link that says “who we are” and has pictures of us. Interestingly, it is mostly pro-choicers who have asked to not have there picture on the site.
It’s interesting that you say “no one is going to take away the right of a [B]medical doctor[/B] to perform abortions”
In fact, it would be Obama who took that right away. Should he have his way any medical professional down to a midwife would be able to perform abortions.
There is no “right” to an abortion. It is allowed as an extrapolation of an extrapolation of an ammendment. It hardly rests on sound constitutionals ground. In fact, the logic used to make the Roe V. Wade decision could just as easily be used to say that any parent could kill a born child or spouse under the heading of “freedom of privacy”. Think about it. The ruling came from an ammendment saying that we could not be forced to house soldiers. From that was taken the “right to privacy” and from that the “right to abortion”. Why could we not also take the “right to kill any member of our household” under the banner of “right to privacy”?
Lauren,
Excellent point. In fact many rights(search and seizure, the right to confront an accuser, the “5th”, cruel and unusual punishment, quatering soldiers in private homes) were listed to protect citizens from gov’t tyranny, not to protect privacy.
And Roe keeps the gov’t from messing with women when a non-viable fetus or embryo is inside their body.
Born babies have rights, and are not inside a person’s body, so it’s ludicrous to say that “privacy” would apply to killing them.
There are principles of freedom and liberty in the Constitution, and many court decisions have affirmed due process and the right to privacy, barring a compelling need on the part of gov’t to abridge it.
Could this title be any more misleading? There’s no proof that this wouldn’t work with embryonic stem cells.
I don’t understand how Obama will take the right to abortion away? (Frankly, McCain wasn’t going to either.) Selecting Palin was just to stave off the Christian prolife wolves who have blood in their eyes. Problem was Palin was just sooooooooo uninformed! McCain would be president now if he has chosen Libermann. But, then again, America still has quite an antisemetic group of voters.
Anyway, I do so wish the Catholic Church would stay out of our ‘civil’ lives and simply deal with spirituality. Though I am sure there are some who believe civilian life and spiritual life are one and the same. Anytime the Catholic Church gets political, it starts to cause problems.
It’s hard for people like me because we see religion as an establish set of ‘mythologies’ all sharing similar themes from the ancient Egyptians to the Greeks to the Romans. Christianity is simply one more mythology along the way.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that! Even the Romans needed to believe Jupiter caused their problems and not themselves. If anything went wrong with the harvest or there were floods, then the Greeks could blame Poseiden. He
was angry. Like today. It’s not global warming that’s the problem: it’s that god is angry. Sheesh.