AIDS cure: Coming soon to healthcare near you?

Part of a French Anti-AIDS campaign

Last week's news about a 42-year-old American man who received a bone marrow transplant as a leukemia treatment and subsequently was no longer HIV-positive is still sending shockwaves through the medical community.  After all, wasn't penicillin discoverd by accident? 

Although Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infections Diseases in the U.S., said the procedure was too costly and too dangerous to employ as a firstline cure, he thinks gene therapy may be the future.

David Roth, a professor of epidemiology and international public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said gene therapy as cheap and effective as current drug treatments is in very early stages of development.

The questions of how long to we have to wait and what the cost for these treatments would be is weighing on the minds of the nearly 33 million people afflicted with HIV/AIDS worldwide.