Aids claim: Experts sceptical

2005-11-15 08:18

Cape Town - Local Aids experts have reacted with scepticism to a British man's claims that he has been cured of HIV/Aids.

Newspapers reported on Monday that Andrew Stimpson, 25, tested positive for HIV in 2002 but when he was tested again in 2003, the virus had inexplicably disappeared.

British doctors told the BBC that it is the best documented case yet of the HI virus disappearing from someone's body. They hope that studying Stimpson would help them find a cure for this disease.

Doctor Francois Venter, clinical director of the University of the Witwatersrand's reproductive health and HIV research unit in Hillbrow, said it is more likely to be a case of erroneous test results.

He said they often find people in Johannesburg claiming to have been HIV-positive and are now negative. However, it always turns out that the first test was incorrectly done or that doctors mixed up results.

"In very complex cases, the virus may disappear" as in the case of someone who was very intensely treated with antiretrovirals in the first hours of his or her infection.

Passing HIV infection

"In this case, I would be very sceptical, particularly because it is a patient whose case isn't well documented," Venter said.

According to Dr Gert van Zyl, an Aids expert at Tygerberg Hospital, there have been cases that made it look as if there is something like a "passing HIV infection". However, these were cases where the virus was contracted through a needle prick or during birth - cases where the virus passed on before it turned into a systemic infection of the body.

"In this case (Stimpson's) it seems however that he had a well established infection for which he tested positive more than once and then became negative. In such a case, one has to ask whether the virus was in fact cured or whether our tests are no longer picking it up."

The current levels of knowledge of the medical world in this regard do not allow them to discount the possibility that someone could be cured of HIV/Aids, but it is very rare to hear of such a case, said Van Zyl.

Van Zyl's colleague, Dr Jantjie Taljaard, said that even if Stimpson had been cured, it would still not be a breakthrough, although it could be an opportunity for one. The reason for Stimpson's alleged recovery should lie with his own physiology, the nature of the virus he had (it could have been a weaker strain) or with something he took.

- Die Burger