The Man Who Beat HIV At Its' Own Game For Nearly 3 Decades...

[Webster]

Nautilus: The Man Who Beat HIV At Its' Own Game For Nearly 30 Years
Excerpt...

For Kai Brothers, 1981 marked the beginning and the end of a golden era. That was the year he turned 19, moved to San Francisco to join one of the world’s largest gay communities, and met his first boyfriend. “We could walk down the street holding hands and kissing somebody in public. It really was a magical time,” Brothers says. But it was short-lived. “Right after I moved here, we started hearing about people dying.”

Brothers, 52, is sitting in his San Francisco living room with his cat on his lap. A computer technician, he has peppery hair and a carefully trimmed beard. The lines in his face are a reminder of the years that have passed, but he looks healthy.

In the 1980s, Brothers had been donating his blood to a San Francisco blood bank, and sometime in 1986, he recalls, it sent him a piece of certified mail that requested he come in for a test. The blood bank had discovered the human immunodeficiency virus in its stock, and wanted to make sure Brothers didn’t have it. He didn’t go in for the test. “It was the classic state of denial,” he says. “I couldn’t manage it.” Brothers interpreted the letter as confirmation that he was HIV positive.

The anxiety of living in doubt took a toll on Brothers, and in 1989 he went in for an HIV test. It was positive. He believes he contracted the virus from his first boyfriend, who developed AIDS in 1991, and died two years later. That was the darkest period in Brothers’ life. He emptied his 401K, thinking that he wouldn’t live long enough to use it.

Surprisingly, though, Brothers never developed any of the symptoms associated with HIV infection. He continued to play softball, act in local plays, and go to work everyday in a bank. “I’m defying the odds here,” Brothers remembers thinking. “There must be something my body is able to do that is keeping me healthy.”

In 1999, one of Brothers’ friends suggested that he visit Jay Levy, a pioneering AIDS researcher at the University of California, San Francisco. (He independently discovered the HIV virus in 1983.) By then the virus could be seen in the light of evolution. As the virus replicates in the body, it mutates. Some mutations allow the virus to advance in a protracted battle over the immune system.

But sometimes the evolving virus can unlock a response that holds HIV in check. Levy told Brothers he had a drop of luck in his blood. His white blood cells seemed to secrete tiny amounts of a substance that controls HIV. At the time, Brothers was only one of several hundred people, out of tens of millions with HIV, known to control HIV in this way. Levy believes an unidentified protein is responsible, and isolating and harnessing it might allow scientists to produce a revolutionary HIV treatment.

Levy said to Brothers that because his body controlled HIV, and he was in good health, he would be an ideal subject for his study. Brothers agreed on the spot. Since then, Brothers has donated blood to Levy’s study about 150 times. He has also sought out other studies of HIV survivors, and continues to cross the country twice a year to donate blood at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland. “I think about all my friends every time I go,” Brothers says. “I just think, ‘This is for you. And I wish you were still here.’ ”

But today, 26 years after he discovered he was infected, Brothers has learned his luck may be running out. Doctors carefully track two signs that foreshadow AIDS: falling white blood cell counts and a rising viral load, or the amount of HIV present in a blood sample. About a year ago, doctors informed Brothers his white blood cell count was worryingly low (under 400), and his viral load was up around 20,000, considered quite high. Since then both markers have improved some, but his doctors are monitoring him closely.

Brothers now faces a vexing choice. He has never taken antiretroviral drugs, which suppress HIV, and have prolonged countless lives. But if he does start taking the drugs, his body will stop producing the substance that has long protected him. He knows HIV is inching closer to causing him harm, but he also knows he has an advantage that doctors could harness to help others. His dilemma mirrors a quandary for medicine. Do drugs that control viruses today also disrupt evolutionary processes that could benefit us for generations to come?

Thoughts?

 

[mrldii]

Dammit, dammit, dammit.

You *made* me read [nearly] that whole thing, trying to figure out which surviving member(s) of the band The Who have had HIV for the past 3 decades.




English, people...English. Learn to use it on this English-speaking version of Off Topixdom, dammit.

 

[Webster]

Dammit, dammit, dammit.

You *made* me read [nearly] that whole thing, trying to figure out which surviving member(s) of the band The Who have had HIV for the past 3 decades.




English, people...English. Learn to use it on this English-speaking version of Off Topixdom, dammit.

*edits thread title* There, its' edited, my friend...