Complete Blood Transfusion?

Wouldn't curing AIDS or other blood related diseases be just a matter of draining ones blood and infusing a completly new change. (like changing oil in a car) Couldn't there also be a way of cleaning the blood outside of the body using heat to destroy the infection and reentering it into the body? Could these ideas work. why or why not?

Wow - I like your idea. There are diseases that are treated this way - exchange transfusions and therapeutic plasma pheresis. But unfortunately the HIV virus likes to hide inside White Blood Cells. These cells are made in the bone marrow and then travel to your blood stream to all over your body. They can sequester - hang out - in your RE system which is your spleen and lymph nodes - until they are needed else where. Destroying all of your White Blood Cells through chemotherapy or whole body irradiation followed by bone marrow transplant doesn't seem to be an option either.

No, it wouldn't work. Do you think only the blood of an Aids patient is affected? No. Your whole body and organs are affected by the virus. If you got new blood it would be contaminated also. Just like people with hepatitis who get liver transplants; chances are the "new" liver will also get hepatitis. If it was as easy as an "oil change", don't you think we would have this horrible disease under control? Good question, though.

aids is in the organs and tissue the blood only moves the virus from one organ to the other ..

For people on dialysis, the blood is cleansed out side of the body. This only removes toxins because of liver failure. If you were to try and heat the blood to destroy AIDs, you would also cook the blood cells. Because of the mechanics of aids, with the virus fixing itself to T cells, you would have to remove only the T cells and replace them, but there is no way to do that.

Nice thought, though, keep thinking!

Completely draining all the blood from a body (living one) isn't possible. The blood perfuses throughout all parts. I believe it works kind of like cancer in that there are cells that are not in the blood stream that contain viruses. Therefore even if you could "drain all the blood" there would still be viruses contained in the cells. Also, heating the blood would cause it to coagulate and not be usuable.