New HIV medicine in the pipeline

This was most interesting. So far the best treatment has been antiretrovirals, of which I had great success with when I was on them. It was just that little thing of acute kidney failure that I had to stop taking those particular ones. For anyone who's not aware BTW, I'm currently on no HIV meds at all. Stopped them early last year after this happened. I've been without meds since then, and although during the hospital dramatics my CD4 count went to an all time low (for me) of only 450, since then without meds and recovering kidneys it's built back up to over 700. All except last time when it dropped 100 points, my guess being because of the stress involved with the money thing.

Anyway, so I'm not eager at all to go on anything again at this point. Not unless I absolutely have to. As long as my immune system is coping OK I'm going to stay off them for as long as I bloody well can. They work fantastically yes as far as controlling the HIV virus, but that doesn't change the fact that they're still very powerful drugs. They are still to some extent a bit experimental, as I found out. 

I'd rather look in the meantime at other ways of staying healthy without the magic pills, simply through lifestyle and living life in a way that is the least stressful. For me that involves being real to my feelings, honest about who I am, and being authentic to both. For me it's a source of peace. What could be more helpful to reducing inner turmoil than being authentic to who you are, no matter what people think of it? 

I'm well past worrying about what people think. That ended last year when I nearly carked it twice in those 2 weeks. I'm on borrowed time now it feels like, I was so close to death. Chance, the universe, a coincidence of events, saw that I lived and didn't die. I guess it's one of the few cards fate has dealt me that hasn't been a fuckin disaster.

So this looks like a better option for me to try if I last long enough for it to become available:

Selzentry (maraviroc), a U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)–approved ARV, works by blocking the interaction between CCR5 and HIV, ultimately retarding the virus’s ability to infect CD4 cells. SB-728-T, a zinc finger DNA-binding protein transcription factor, goes one step further—it blocks the gene responsible for making CCR5, mimicking a naturally occurring human mutation that renders individuals largely resistant to the virus.

This mutation, dubbed CCR5 delta-32, appears to have no harmful effect in the human body. In addition, a study published in the journal Blood in December 2010 reported that an HIV-positive person with leukemia was cured of HIV when he received a bone marrow transplant from a “matched” donor who had inherited this delta-32 CCR5 mutation from both parents. (When the mutation is inherited from one parent, CCR5 is produced, but at low quantities and is associated with slower HIV disease progression. When the mutation is inherited from both parents, which is very rare, little or no CCR5 is expressed on CD4 cells, rendering the cells impervious to forms of HIV that use the CCR5 receptor to enter cells.)
Link

They even go so far as to suggest there may be an actual cure for HIV following this path, but there is no fuckin way in the world I would ever go through it. The "cure" in this case sounds much worse than the bloody disease. I would just stick to more "traditional" approaches I expect, rather than something so drastic as this:

Fully curing HIV will be a bit more complicated, as it ultimately requires replacing the entire CD4 population with HIV-resistant cells, not merely creating a small reservoir of protected cells. A curative approach will likely involve removing and treating stem cells with CCR5 and possibly CXCR4 knockout genes, administering high-dose chemotherapy to wipe out the existing HIV-susceptible immune system, followed by transplanting the modified stem cells to rebuild an immune system that is resistant to the virus.