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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.
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.
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