HIV/AIDS: 40 years, 40 million deaths worldwide and still no vaccine or naturally cured people
40 years ago, on May 20, 1983, two French researchers, Luc MONTAGNIER, Françoise BARRE-SINOUSSI and Jean-Claude CHERMANN, revealed in the journal Science, the existence of a mysterious disease that would become AIDS. The disease has already killed more than 40 million people, and treatments have been developed to help people live with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). However, no effective vaccine has yet been developed to combat this pathology, which is proving to be one of the biggest health challenges of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Indeed, "unlike Covid-19, HIV has a very high genetic variability. It transforms its RNA into DNA in the body and develops a large number of viral variants within the same individual," explains Jennifer Pasquier, Scientific Director of Sidaction (France). "No one has ever cured HIV naturally," she adds. There were the patients in Düsseldorf, London and Berlin, three HIV patients whose bodies no longer show any trace of the virus, but their recovery was far from natural.
