Making headlines around the world today is the news that a baby born with the HIV virus that causes AIDS has apparently been cured, scientists announced Sunday.
The case involves a child from Mississippi who is now 2 .5 yeas old. He has been off medication for about a year now with no signs of infection. This startling progress could mean a boon to treat infected newborns and drastically reduce the number of HIV infected infants.
Specialists claim that Sunday’s announcement which came at the 2013 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Atlanta, presents promising clues for efforts to eliminate HIV infection in children, especially in AIDS-plagued African nations, where numerous babies are born with the virus.
Dr. Deborah Persaud of John Hopkins University in Baltimore was one of the lead researchers and author of the report that was released by The Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR). Dr. Rowena Johnston, director of amfAR, told media that the infant was diagnosed with HIV at birth to a mother who did not receive prenatal care or HIV treatment.
Reportedly, the infant was moved to the University of Mississippi Medical Center and started an antiretroviral treatment approximately 30 hours after birth. Doctors prescribed three aggressive drugs – AZT, 3TC and Nevirapine, immediately after birth. Johnston is specifying the early medicinal interventions as the difference-makers.
“If one had to make an educational guess, the difference was receiving the treatment dose very soon after birth, earlier than standard of care in the US,” Johnston said.
According to news reports, the baby was on treatment and in care until the initial 12 to 15 months, however, the baby was not brought in for further treatment as doctors lost contact with the mother and therefore the baby stopped receiving any medication what so ever. The baby came back for treatment at 23 months of age. This time, a diagnostic test concluded that viral loads were undetectable, despite the child being off care for more than a year.
Johnston said the results were all the more shocking because doctors do not usually recommend stopping treatment at any time for children with HIV from birth.
For now, Persaud’s team is preparing for a study to try to prove that, with more aggressive treatment of other high-risk babies. “Maybe we’ll be able to block this reservoir seeding,” Persaud said.
About 300,000 children were born with HIV in 2011, mostly in poor countries where only about 60 per cent of infected pregnant women get treatment that can keep them from passing the virus to their babies, as per news reports.
Written by Garima Goswami, Assistant Editor for DARPAN Magazine
Image Courtesy telegraph.co.uk and John Hopkins University (Dr. Deborah Persaud)
