Earlier this year, doctors gave a 30-year-old woman in Argentina the pseudonym "the Esperanza Patient" to protect her identity, but not because she had committed a crime. In fact, just the opposite. The Esperanza Patient had done something that only one other person had ever done, but that offers a glimmer of hope for many more.
Eight years ago, the young woman from the Argentine city of Esperanza was diagnosed with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Although HIV is no longer the death sentence it was several decades ago, it is still practically incurable. Yet somehow, this woman had "cured" herself. Without medical intervention such as stem cell transplantation, her doctors could no longer find evidence of any HIV particles in her body.
This kind of miraculous self-cure has happened only once before, to a 67-year-old California woman named Loreen Willenberg. She had lived with HIV for 27 years before suddenly appearing virus-free in 2020. While doctors currently have no real idea how these two women cured themselves, they say the cases offer hope for all HIV/AIDS patients. "This makes us hopeful that a natural cure of HIV is actually possible," said Xu You, a viral immunologist at the Ragon Institute in Boston. Fittingly, "Esperanza" means "hope" in Spanish.
More about HIV:
- It is estimated that 1 out of every 7 people in the United States infected with HIV do not know that they carry the virus.
- With the help of antiretroviral treatment, many people with HIV can now live healthily for decades after diagnosis.
- Around one million people die of HIV-related illnesses each year; around half of those deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa.