18 months ago, an American baby girl was born with HIV and given very early treatment with standard drug therapy. Now, doctors say that the child is, by all appearances, cured of the life-threatening disease, which could point the way for a new HIV cure.
Thanks to her treatment, administered within hours of her birth, the toddler from Mississippi has been off medication for nearly a year and is showing no signs of infection. Though doctors say that more tests need to be carried out before they can prove that the treatment would work for others, if the girl does stay healthy, her case could be the reason for the world’s second reported HIV cure.
However, that is not to say that scientists have found the HIV Holy Grail, as the possibility of permanent remission is still up in the air. Further, the treatment will not benefit the wellbeing of older children or adults with HIV, as wellness experts explain that the disease will have had too much time to progress and establish itself.
Medical health professionals still assert that, regardless of the results of this treatment, prevention is the best way to conquer HIV. If, as a pregnant woman with HIV, you were given anti-HIV treatment during pregnancy, and then had a low-risk caesarean delivery and did not breastfeed, you would reduce your baby’s chance of being HIV negative by 98%.
When it comes to that other 2%, Dr Deborah Persaud, a virologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, asserts that this early-administered treatment ‘is a proof of concept that HIV can be potentially curable in infants.’ Dr Persaud was responsible for presenting the findings at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Atlanta.
So what did the treatment involve? The Mississippi baby was given anti-retroviral therapy, which is a cocktail of widely available drugs that are already used to treat HIV infection in infants. When the child was just 30 hours old, paediatric HIV specialist Dr Hannah Gay put the infant on a cocktail of three standard HIV-fighting drugs, even before laboratory tests came back confirming the infection. She explained that as her mother had not been given anti-HIV treatment, ‘I just felt like this baby was at higher-than-normal risk and deserved our best shot.’
Her doctors believe that the reason that the treatment seemed to work was because it wiped out the disease before it could hide out in her body. Dr Persaud explained that when HIV forms these reservoirs of dormant cells, the disease can quickly re-infect you as soon as you stop medication. According to Dr Persaud, ‘This sets the stage for paediatric care agenda.’
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