Cure for HIV and AIDS is under research and we still don’t have any permanent solution to the disease. The reason why there’s no cure for the deadly disease is that maybe we are having a wrong approach. HIV is generally treated as a unisexual disease where the same methods are applied for both men and women.
But a recent study indicates that HIV works differently for both men and women, and different treatment methods are used for both cases. The sex differences in HIV exist on a large scale and HIV/AIDS cure strategies must be tailored according to the gender of the infected patient.
HIV Treatment has to be Done Based on Sex
Eileen Scully from the John Hopkins University School of Medicine gave a presentation on the sex differences in HIV during the last month in a Boston Conference. It was shown that there exists a difference based on sex in the viral reservoir, immune system and HIV infected cells going in the latent state.
HIV replicates slowly and has a lower residual rate while using antiretroviral therapy (ART), in women as compared to men. Also, the viral load in women take longer to rebound, and the HIV DNA producing new copies of the virus in the cells are also lower.
HIV Cure Research on All-Women Patients
Most of the HIV research carried till now has hardly any women and the average female ratio is just 17 percentage. It is why focus is given to have an all-women HIV research experiment and one such cure study was named Moxie. It showed that “kick and kill” strategy to drive latently infected cells to produce virus again can be used as an effective treatment.
More such all women based HIV cure testing is happening in the United States and South Africa. Once the main difference between HIV in men and women is found out, hopefully, we can have a more accurate cure for HIV.
