Gatell talks about Fauci's and Siciliano's staments

[loop78]

I'm posting this here because I don't believe it really fits in the "research news" forum, despite some of the info it refers to has been posted there.

This is the translation of part of an interview with José María Gatell, ex president of the European Aids Clinic Society and head of the ID unit of the Hospital Clínic of Barcelona.

"Question: NIAID's director, Anthony Faucy, said last Wednesday in an special session hiv would be curable in some patients in the future, what's your oppinion about that statement?

Doctor Fauci is a great investigator and one of the most intelligent people I know in the field of infectious diseases, but he's also one of the people who's made more predictions in the field of hiv that didn't turn out to be true. Right now we don't have any data that could let us predict we're gonna erradicate de virus -cure- from an hiv infected person. The functional cure Fauci talked about belongs to the field of therapeutic vaccines and, at the present day, none of them works. It would consist on, after administering haart, being able to stop treatment and not having the viral load rising in a few weeks as it happens today.

Another leading researcher, Robert Siciliano, has explained at the conference that, in this sense, he believes antiretrovirals have already achieved all that could be obtained from them, and formulating new meds is not gonna get us any further in the fight against hiv. Just the opposite of Fauci's predictions, Siciliano's ones tend to be right. It's true meds' side effects and ease of use could be improved, but they're not gonna lead us to a cure. To cure the virus or prevent it from replicating when treatment is stopped, something new has to be done, something different to antiretrovirals."

Edited to add the link to the full interview in Spanish: http://www.publico.es/ciencias/141064/vih/sida

[BT65]

And there you have it.