Where’s the harm in fake AIDS cures?

First of all, fake cures are a swindle. Many peddlers of bogus cures insist their clients avoid all other treatments, including antiretroviral medicines. By the time a patient realises the “cure” hasn’t worked, their prospects for successful antiretroviral treatment may well have diminished.
Fake cures may also cause direct harm to health. Finally, the promotion of fake AIDS cures undermines HIV prevention. Curing AIDS is generally taken to mean clearing the body of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Usually the infected cells produce numerous HIV particles and die soon afterwards. Unfortunately, not all infected cells behave the same way. Probably the most important problem is posed by “resting” CD4 cells. Current therapies cannot remove HIV’s genetic material from these cells.
A cure for AIDS must somehow remove every single one of the infected cells.

Many researchers believe the best hope for eradicating HIV infection lies in combining antiretroviral treatment with drugs that flush HIV from its hiding places. The idea is to force resting CD4 cells to become active, whereupon they will start producing new HIV particles. The activated cells should soon die or be destroyed by the immune system, and the antiretroviral medication should mop up the released HIV.

Early attempts to employ this technique used interleukin-2 (also known as IL-2 or by the brand name Proleukin). This chemical messenger tells the body to create more CD4 cells and to activate resting cells. Researchers who gave interleukin-2 together with antiretroviral treatment discovered they could no longer find any infected resting CD4 cells. But interleukin-2 failed to clear all of the HIV; as soon as the patients stopped taking antiretroviral drugs the virus came back again.1 2

Many researchers believe the best hope for eradicating HIV infection lies in combining antiretroviral treatment with drugs that flush HIV from its hiding places. The idea is to force resting CD4 cells to become active, whereupon they will start producing new HIV particles. This chemical messenger tells the body to create more CD4 cells and to activate resting cells. Researchers who gave interleukin-2 together with antiretroviral treatment discovered they could no longer find any infected resting CD4 cells. Scientists are now investigating chemicals that don’t activate all resting CD4 cells, but only the tiny minority that are infected with HIV.