PICTURED: Fifth man ever cured of HIV

The identity of the fifth ever patient to go into full remission for HIV has been released to the public.

Paul Edmonds, 67, of Desert Hot Springs, California, about 100 miles east of Los Angeles, was cured of the disease in July. At the time, he was anonymously known as the “City of Hope Patient,” named after the hospital in which he was treated.

He was diagnosed with AIDS in 1988, during the height of the country’s epidemic. Advances in medicine have since made his disease undetectable and non-transmissible.

But as a gay man, Mr. Edmonds says that now that he is cured of the disease from which many of his friends died decades ago, he is “grateful to be alive.”

He was cured using a rare but risky blood stem cell transplant from a person who has a blood mutation that makes him resistant to HIV. The transplant can often lead to a deadly infection. That is why it is reserved for people like Mr. Edmonds who suffer from advanced stage cancer.

“I was incredibly grateful. I am thankful that I am alive. I was thankful that there was a donor,” he told ABC.

Mr. Edmunds grew up in Georgia. In the mid-1970s, he moved to San Francisco, California, to be with a larger gay community.

Years later, the AIDS epidemic would break out, ravaging cities like San Francisco and New York with large gay communities.

The disease was first referred to as Gay-Related Immune Deficiency (GRID) in 1981, when the virus was sweeping through the community.

As a sexually transmitted disease, AIDS spread rapidly among gay and bisexual men. At the time, there was little information about how the disease spread and many continued to have unprotected sex.

Studies have shown that gay and bisexual men are more likely to have multiple sexual partners than their peers, increasing the potential spread of disease.

These men are also more likely to have older partners. An older gay man is more likely to carry the disease than he probably has had more previous sexual encounters.

At the peak of the epidemic in 1995, 41,000 Americans died of AIDS. A large proportion of these were gay men. About 10,000 deaths were recorded annually in the late 1980s.

Mr. Edmunds remembered seeing obituaries of his friends and loved ones every week.

“At first it was like a curse. People were afraid of each other,” he said.

The man was initially afraid to be tested for the virus, fearing it would be a “death sentence.” In 1988 he finally got a test, and he was ‘shocked’ by the positive result.

HIV, or the human immunodeficiency virus, attacks the body’s immune system. This makes a person extremely vulnerable to other viruses and illnesses, such as the flu.

When the number of CD4 cells — white blood cells responsible for fighting infection — falls below 200 per cubic millimeter of blood, the HIV has progressed into acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS).

The rapid emergence of the disease in the 1980s left the medical community behind and little information was available for treatment and prevention.

Eventually, increased public awareness of HIV/AIDS led to a fall in case and death rates again.

In 1987, the first antiretroviral therapy came on the market, which strengthened the immune system despite AIDS and made the disease undetectable and incommunicable. Mr Edmunds used these treatments.

Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) was introduced in 2012. Users of the daily pill can reduce their risk of contracting HIV through sex by 99 percent.

The combination of these drugs has made the disease manageable for men like Mr. Edmunds, but he was still living with the virus until last year.

In 2018 he was diagnosed with leukemia, cancer in the blood. Although the disease is relatively rare, it is often fatal.

Each year in America, about 60,000 cases will be diagnosed and 23,000 will die.

He sought treatment at the City of Hope Medical Center, just outside Los Angeles.

While he was undergoing chemotherapy, the doctors realized they had a chance to cure Mr. Edmunds of both illnesses at once.

A rare stem cell transplant that had been successfully used in four previous patients suffering from the disease pair became an option.

Because the treatment itself can be fatal, doctors will only use it on someone who is already near death.

Doctors found a donor who was not related to him but had a rare genetic mutation called homozygous CCR5 Delta 32.

People who have the mutation have a natural resistance to HIV because they have a CCR5 receptor on their immune cells that can block the pathways the virus needs to replicate.

It’s a very rare mutation. It occurs in about 1 percent of the population. So it’s not that, it’s not something we come across very often,” Dr. Jana Ditker, Mr. Edmunds’ City of Hope doctor, told ABC.

These types of transplants can be deadly because there is a chance that the body’s immune system will reject the implanted cells and start attacking them.

After undergoing reduced-intensity chemotherapy treatments that would make the transplant more bearable, he underwent a blood stem cell transplant in early 2019.

Two years later, in mid-2021, Mr Edmunds was declared cured of HIV.

“We were delighted to let him know that his HIV is in remission and that he no longer needs the antiretroviral therapy that he has been taking for over 30 years,” said Dr. Dick last year.

“He watched many of his friends die of AIDS in the early days of the disease and faced so much stigma when he was diagnosed with HIV in 1988. But now he can celebrate this medical milestone.”

The first man to successfully undergo this treatment was Timothy Ray Brown – dubbed the “Berlin patient” – whose bone marrow transplant in 2007 rid his body of the virus.

Although he has since passed away from cancer, his story was a breakthrough in HIV treatment and set the stage for future findings.

While this treatment holds promise and could bring hope to many of the suffering people, its applications are relatively limited.

Still, experts hope that the breakthroughs of recent months will enable better treatments for the virus.