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Researchers Describe First 'Functional HIV Cure' In an Infant
An anonymous reader writes in with news of a breakthrough in the treatment of HIV. "A baby born with the AIDS virus two years ago in Mississippi who was put on antiretroviral therapy within hours of birth appears to have been cured of the infection, researchers said Sunday 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."
It comes too late....no unsafe sex orgies for me :(
The baby was infected, but this is a "functional cure", it works like this: Whilst in-utero the baby receives a certain amount of protection from the mother's immune system and the filtering of the placenta. When it's born it does have the virus, and then the baby's own immune system begins to kick in. At this point, immediately after birth, they begin an aggressive but fairly standard treatment with antiviral medication. This suppresses the virus enough that the immune system then has a fighting chance, and whilst the virus is unlikely to be completely eradicated it is in theory manageable by the immune system for the rest of the baby's life. The virus is still there, but kept to very low levels so developing AIDS or passing the virus on becomes very unlikely.
This approach may work with adults, but you have to get in there very quickly with the antivirals, so it's more likely to work with, for example, a nurse who gets a needlestick injury than a person who contracted it days before. The developing immune system in infants may also play a part, so this may never be a "functional cure" in adults, but it's certainly a step forward.
Remember, we don't necessarily need to cure things like HIV and cancer, we just need to keep them at bay until something else kills the patient, that still counts as a functional cure.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
"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."
The last part of this sentence states that infection was confirmed. However, I'd be interested to know the rate of false positives versus the rate of false negatives. There is surely always a chance that the positive tests were wrong?
While having an HIV-infected mother may give an impression of irresponsibility, there are people out there with no history of promiscuity or drug use that have caught HIV for many different reasons. I won't make judgements based on this.
But the following two newspaper quotes caught my attention.
BBC:
The treatment was continued for 18 months, at which point the child disappeared from the medical system. Five months later the mother and child turned up again but had stopped the treatment in this interim.
Washington Post:
"The child’s mother began missing appointments after a year. At 18 months, the child was no longer on treatment. When the child was brought back to the clinic at 23 months, the viral load was still undetectable, “very much to my surprise,” Gay wrote.
It strikes me as wildly irresponsible to the point of criminal neglect to miss medical appointments for your HIV-infected child. It does not appear as if she was told it was ok not to turn up for these appointments. After all, the doctors expected the HIV infection to return if the drug treatment wasn't kept up. If this had happened, and the child had died, I would have expected the mother to be prosecuted for manslaughter.
The baby was infected, but this is a "functional cure", it works like this: Whilst in-utero the baby receives a certain amount of protection from the mother's immune system and the filtering of the placenta. When it's born it does have the virus, and then the baby's own immune system begins to kick in. At this point, immediately after birth, they begin an aggressive but fairly standard treatment with antiviral medication. This suppresses the virus enough that the immune system then has a fighting chance, and whilst the virus is unlikely to be completely eradicated it is in theory manageable by the immune system for the rest of the baby's life. The virus is still there, but kept to very low levels so developing AIDS or passing the virus on becomes very unlikely.
I was thinking that maybe it worked because the treatment was before the baby's immune system kicked in. As HIV spreads by infecting the immune system clearing the load before then could clear the infection.
A baby born to an infected mother will have antibodies but not necessarily virus. It takes a very sevsitive test to verify the presence of virus, and such a test gets false positives. It's hard to really rule out the possibility the baby was born uninfected.
raises hope for the more than 300,000 babies born with the infection around the world each year.
Especially when the majority of these infants are born in "third-world" countries, where people can't afford the basic stuff like food and water, they'll be able to cure their infants with this new treatment because the big pharmas will provide it for free. Can't wait for this to happen, along with the sun rising from the west
I can't help but think of the economic outcome of procedures like this once it becomes FDA-approved, mainstream treatment.
Anti-HIV drugs are outrageously expensive, partly because it's a long-term treatment. Incurring this expense at birth would severely affect one's ability to earn a decent living later on, even before being hit my student loans, mortgage, etc.
A new generation of complete povery is imminent.
Did you read the article or the summary? Did you even read the head line? The whole point of the story is the possibility that if treatment is given early enough it can become a functional cure, whereupon you may not need to receive any more treatment, ever, because your immune system can deal with it for the rest of your life.
The whole point of this story is the (possibly) good news that we may avoid exactly what you describe.
That wretched continent breeds nothing but human incompetence and disease.
Homo sapiens isn't the only species to come out of Africa,
Oh, I'm sorry sir, I thought you were referring to me, Mr. Wensleydale.
Not sure in what sense you meant that, but it would be premature to start running around having unprotected sex with everybody in celebration.