世界離終結艾滋還遠嗎?

IN JOURNALISM, cynics suggest, three data points are enough to pronounce a trend. As of March 3rd, AIDS researchers hope that two might be sufficient. On that day Deborah Persaud of Johns Hopkins University announced to the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Atlanta, Georgia, that a patient under her care had been cured of HIV infection. The announcement was hedged in the usual caveats (“functionally cured” was the exact term used). But the bottom line was clear. Dr Persaud thinks her patient, a two-and-a-half-year-old girl whose identity is confidential, has joined Timothy Brown, a man known to many as the “Berlin patient”, as a human being who was once definitively infected with HIV and now no longer is.

在新聞界，憤世嫉俗者認爲三個案例足以推斷出一種趨勢。自3月3日起，艾滋病研究人員則希望兩個可能就足夠了。在那一天，（美國）約翰霍普金斯大學的黛博拉·佩爾紹德在佐治亞州的亞特蘭大召開的逆轉錄病毒和機會性感染會議上表示，她已治癒一位患有艾滋病毒的病人。這一消息也受到很多的質疑（確切的稱“功能性治癒”）。但是情況很清楚。佩爾紹德博士認爲她的病人（2歲半的女孩，具體身份未透露）和人稱“柏林病人”蒂莫西·布朗的病例相同，布朗曾確診感染艾滋病毒，現已完全治癒。

The facts of the case that Dr Persaud was prepared to make public are limited (the patient is, after all, a child). But the pertinent point is that she was born infected because her mother was infected and was treated with standard anti-retroviral drugs almost immediately and for 18 months afterwards. She was then lost track of for five months. When the child returned to doctors’ attention, they found the virus had vanished—and six months later, despite the fact that the girl is no longer taking anti-AIDS medicine, there is no sign of HIV having returned in force.

佩爾紹德博士準備公之於衆的案例是有侷限性的（畢竟這僅是個孩子）。但是相關的內容是：因爲小孩的媽媽感染了艾滋病毒，小孩在出生時被診斷出攜帶艾滋病毒，研究人員隨即對其進行了18個月的標準性抗逆轉錄病毒治療。此後五個月中止了治療。當醫生再次對該小孩進行檢查時，發現她體內病毒已消失—6個月之後，雖然小女孩不用再服用抗艾滋病毒藥物，但是她體內已沒有艾滋病毒繁殖的跡象。

This is a result of great potential significance. Mr Brown’s cure was effected, accidentally, because his bone marrow (and thus the pertinent part of his immune system, which HIV infects) was destroyed and replaced during a course of treatment for leukaemia. That is hardly a viable approach for those who do not have that disease. But if HIV infection can be cured with drugs, as Dr Persaud’s observations suggest, a whole, new line of investigation opens up.

這一成功案例有潛在的重大意義。布朗先生的艾滋病意外地得到治癒，是因爲在進行白血病治療過程中，他的骨髓（以及受艾滋病感染的相關免疫系統部分）遭到破壞並得到移植。對於那些沒有患白血病的艾滋病毒感染者來說，這不是一個可行的治癒方法。佩爾紹德博士的研究表明，如果藥物能夠治癒艾滋病患者，一項全新的調查研究即將開啓。