Baby Born with AIDS Apparently Cured in US
Baku, March 4 (AZERTAC). A baby girl born with the AIDS virus two years ago in the US State of Mississippi appears to have been cured after very early treatment with standard drug therapy, researchers said at a scientific conference in Atlanta.
Whether the cure is complete and permanent, or only partial and long-lasting, is not certain. Either way, the highly unusual case raises hope for the more than 300,000 babies born with the infection around the world each year.
The child is now two-and-a-half years old and has been off medication for about a year with no signs of infection.
If the findings in the new case bear up under further scrutiny, it will mark the first time the infection has been cured by drugs. The only known cure of a case of HIV infection occurred in 2007. An American man living in Germany got a bone-marrow transplant from a donor who had a rare HIV-resistance mutation in his cells.
More testing needs to be done to see if the treatment would have the same effect on other children.
Dr. Deborah Persaud, a virologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, presented the findings at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Atlanta.
“This is a proof of concept that HIV can be potentially curable in infants,” she said.
The case of the Mississippi baby involved a cocktail of widely available drugs already used to treat HIV infection in infants.
It suggests the treatment wiped out HIV before it could form hideouts in the body.
These so-called reservoirs of dormant cells usually rapidly re-infect anyone who stops medication, said Dr. Persaud.
The baby was born in a rural hospital where the mother had only just tested positive for HIV infection.
Because the mother had not been given any prenatal HIV treatment, doctors knew the baby was at high risk of being infected.
Researchers said the baby was then transferred to the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson.
Once there, paediatric HIV specialist Dr. Hannah Gay put the infant on a cocktail of three standard HIV-fighting drugs at just 30 hours old, even before laboratory tests came back confirming the infection.
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