Erroneous News Report That Koop Believes There Will Never Be a Cure

On January 27 U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop was widely quoted as saying that he didn't believe a cure for AIDS would ever be found. Koop was speaking at a London conference of health officials from 148 nations.
We called Koop's office to find out what information that report was based on, and learned instead that the report was erroneous, that is not Koop's position. Koop meant to say that some people believe there would never be a cure because the HIV virus integrates itself into the genetic information of the cells it infects. But he himself remains optimistic, because there are ways to interfere with the activities of the virus.
Unfortunately the error went all over the world but correction received little publicity.
The day after the initial report, leading AIDS expert Robert Gallo, M.D. replied that no one could safely predict what would happen in the next five years. He added that he would not be working on the problem if he did not think it could be solved.
We could add that many scientists are working on the approach of killing the infected cells--probably by forcing the latent virus to express itself and then killing the cell when it does. The virus infects few cells at any one time, and the body could easily spare those. Many immunologists believe that full recovery would occur if the virus could be entirely stopped.
Even targeting the virus while it is latent in the DNA of the cell may not be forever impossible. A new technology called hybridons uses short, manufactured strands of DNA to attach to specific genes and block them. Hybridons have already shown partial success against the AIDS virus in laboratory tests (Breakthrough newsletter, published by Boardroom Reports, Boulder, CO, January 1987).
Although a complete cure seems far away at this time, it may instead be possible to control the disease indefinitely with continued treatment--keeping people alive and healthy throughout their normal lifespan or until a cure is found.