Word: viruses
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...Hong Kong has good reason to be afraid. The economy is experiencing its worst slowdown since the SARS virus rampaged the city in 2003, stalling the economy for months on end. GDP shrank 0.5% in the third quarter - the second consecutive quarter-on-quarter contraction. That officially means Hong Kong is in a recession, and it doesn't look likely to end any time soon. The government lowered its forecast for 2008 growth from 4-5% to 3-3.5%. "The global financial turmoil has derailed the economic upturn that Hong Kong has enjoyed," government economist Helen Chan told reporters...
...human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is a pathogen so wily and protean that researchers rarely talk about curing infected patients, focusing instead on treatment and prevention. But in an announcement that caused a flutter of excitement and a wave of prudent skepticism, Berlin-based hematologist Gero Huetter claimed on Thursday that he has cured an HIV infection in a 42-year-old man through a bone-marrow transplant...
...citizen living in Germany, was suffering from advanced leukemia and HIV two years ago when Huetter treated the cancer with a bone-marrow transplant at Berlin's Charité hospital. As a side experiment, he inserted the bone marrow of a donor naturally resistant to HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. (Researchers have long known that about 1% of Europeans carry a genetic mutation that makes their cells resistant to HIV infection.) Bone marrow produces the cells that HIV attacks. So, the thinking went, inserting marrow that produces HIV-resistant cells might endow the patient with a means to repel...
...hide in hard-to-detect "reservoir" cells in various parts of the body. Current antiviral drugs, for example, can lower a patient's "viral load" to the point that HIV is undetectable in his or her bloodstream. But as soon as such patients are taken off antivirals, the virus comes storming back...
...Huetter's patient has not received antivirals for two years and remains virus-free even in the known HIV hiding spots of brain and rectal tissue, according to Huetter's tests. But many researchers remain skeptical about whether these tests have been thorough enough. Dr. Andrew Badley, director of the HIV and immunology research lab at the Mayo Clinic, told the Associated Press, "A lot more scrutiny from a lot of different biological samples would be required to say it's not present...