[lyka_candelario]

Desperate times certainly call for desperate measures! Any lay person who would read that a dying seven year old girl injected with HIV as cure for her cancer would go skeptical if not ballistic. Calls for ethics would be rising and rights for children if not women will be topping the charts, though unsummoned. This happens when reaction comes first before response, which is actually common nowadays.

Let’s first get the overview of the two diseases:

Leukemia is the cancer of the blood or bone marrow causing an abnormal increase of immature white blood cells, wherein such cells are responsible for fighting sicknesses and harmful foreign substances in our body. Since they come out immature, they also tend to be useless, causing the body’s ability to combat diseases to falter. We know of chemotherapy, radiotherapy, bone marrow transplant, and hormonal therapy as treatments for such a condition.

Human Immuno-deficiency Virus (HIV), on the other hand, profoundly affects one’s immune system by attacking it, allowing life-threatening infections to thrive. It can cause AIDS and is transmitted via the breast milk, vaginal fluid, semen, and blood.

What civilians do not know is that the HIV particles being injected in such a procedure are actually non-disease-causing. Lymphatic T-cells (which are white blood cells) are being ‘attacked’ by the HIV so when the host’s cells recognize this, the body, in time, allows its T-cells to proliferate. Not only that, cancer cells are also being remarkably cleared off down to the last, ‘curing’ Leukemia, which took only a month!

It’s actually noteworthy to read that such a process can both be a vaccine and a treatment. But can this actually be the long-awaited cure? A deadly virus against the dreadful cancer?

What’s just so ironic is that what you know as a probable ‘cure’ for a life-threatening disease is actually coming from a more fatal one. They sure have dealt fire with fire.