What About A Cure?
“From Mice Into Men” (October 2010) by Regan Hofmann with Tim Horn proposed that the gap between groundbreaking science and a game-changing cure can only be closed with more advocacy, funding and human clinical trials.

Being a rapid progressor, currently having a spate of good health, I love it when people start talking cure. Most diseases have walks for the cure. You almost never hear that word when it comes to AIDS. I just won the courage award in the DC AIDS Walk this year, and I am willing to do anything I can to promote funding a cure! I plan to run a marathon every year, when I can afford it, until there is a cure. My name is Waldon Adams, and I am living with HIV, and I run for AIDS cures!


Waldon Adams
Washington, DC


From the beginning of the community response to the HIV epidemic, people living with HIV and their supporters have been demanding research to find a cure. Unfortunately once successful treatments were developed, which also generated huge profits for the companies that are marketing these drugs, the research emphasis shifted away from finding a cure for HIV to finding the next best copy of an HIV drug to control the virus’s replication. While all people with HIV are glad that new effective treatments to control the virus are in the research pipeline, we all know that the only sustainable response to the HIV epidemic will be an outright cure for HIV and not another expensive drug to keep replication at bay. With the advances made in recent years to increase our knowledge of how HIV infects the cell and how the virus makes people ill, and with the successful eradication of HIV from the Berlin Patient who obtained a bone marrow transplant, it is clear that the time to heighten the search for a cure is now! Thank you for reminding the public of the ever-growing urgent needs to find a total cure for HIV! No one who has ever lost a loved one to HIV should rest until we have a cure! No more needless HIV deaths!


Eric Sawyer
New York City


Finding The Cure
In “The Doctor Is In” (October 2010), POZ editor-in-chief Regan Hofmann speaks with Anthony Fauci, MD, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is part of the National Institutes of Health, about finding a cure for AIDS.

[The U.S. government spends] $4.9 billion each day in Afghanistan. I want to think there will be a cure, but the money isn’t behind it. I did a check on what it would cost me to pay for my antiretroviral meds if I didn’t have insurance—$4,200 a month. The pharmacies aren’t going to give that up. The old way of thinking was to save the antiretrovirals [until you needed them]. Now it’s back to treat ASAP.


Mark Edwards
Los Angeles


Treatment Failure
“At the End of Your Rope?” (October 2010) discussed how the current success of antiretroviral treatments has halted the development of new treatment options for long-term survivors with drug-resistant HIV.

Thanks for the article. I have been positive for almost 30 years and have shown a viral load about half of the time. My [CD4s] are finally up to the upper 400s, but I suspect I’m on the latest drugs now, resistant to others.


Joel
Phippsburg, Maine