Child apparently cured of AIDS
WASHINGTON - A baby born with the AIDS virus appears to have been cured, scientists announced Sunday, describing the case of a child from Mississippi who's now 21/2 and has been off medication for about a year with no signs of infection.
WASHINGTON - A baby born with the AIDS virus appears to have been cured, scientists announced Sunday, describing the case of a child from Mississippi who's now 21/2 and has been off medication for about a year with no signs of infection.
There's no guarantee the child will remain healthy, although sophisticated testing uncovered just traces of the virus' genetic material still lingering. If so, it would mark the world's second reported cure.
Specialists say Sunday's announcement, at a major AIDS meeting in Atlanta, offers promising clues for efforts to eliminate HIV infection in children, especially in AIDS-plagued African countries where many babies are born with the virus.
"You could call this about as close to a cure, if not a cure, that we've seen," said Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health, a doctor who is familiar with the findings.
A doctor gave this baby faster and stronger treatment than is usual, starting a three-drug infusion within 30 hours of birth. That was before tests confirmed the infant was infected and not just at risk from a mother whose HIV wasn't diagnosed until she was in labor.
"I just felt like this baby was at higher-than-normal risk, and deserved our best shot," Hannah Gay, a pediatric HIV specialist at the University of Mississippi, said in an interview.
That fast action apparently knocked out HIV in the baby's blood before it could form hideouts in the body. Those so-called reservoirs of dormant cells usually rapidly re-infect anyone who stops medication, said Deborah Persaud, a doctor with Johns Hopkins Children's Center.
She led the investigation that deemed the child "functionally cured," meaning in long-term remission even if all traces of the virus haven't been completely eradicated.
Next, Persaud's team is planning 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.
Better than treatment is to prevent babies from being born with HIV in the first place.
About 300,000 children were born with HIV in 2011, mostly in poor countries where only about 60 percent of infected pregnant women receive treatment that can keep them from passing the virus to their babies.
In the United States, such births are very rare because HIV testing and treatment long have been part of prenatal care.
The only other person considered cured of the AIDS virus underwent a very different and risky kind of treatment - a bone-marrow transplant from a special donor, one of the rare people who is naturally resistant to HIV. Timothy Ray Brown of San Francisco has not needed HIV medications in the five years since that transplant.
In Mississippi, the mother's HIV is being controlled with medication and she is "quite excited for her child," Gay said.