A Mississippi baby born two and a half years ago has been functionally cured of HIV, according to doctors and scientists. The baby was aggressively treated with antiretroviral drugs starting around 30 hours after birth something that is not standard practice.
The unidentified child has been off medication for about a year with no signs of the HIV infection. This is already unprecedented. If the child remains healthy, it would mark only the second time in the world s history that a person has been cured of HIV the only other case involved a bone marrow transplant.
The now landmark case was announced Sunday at the 2013 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Atlanta.
"We think it was that very early and aggressive treatment," Hannah Gay University of Mississippi pediatric infectious disease specialist told NPR "that curtailed the formation of viral reservoirs. It's exciting to us," she continues. "Because if we were able to replicate this, I think it would be very good news."
Dr. Bloom does not believe that this is a freak occurrence. He says, It makes sense that stopping the replication of HIV before it has established itself in the genome of the host s T-cells and in other reservoirs might be enough to allow the virus to be cleared from the child s body. There is no guarantee that it won t return at a later time, but the absence of HIV replication one year following cessation of antiretroviral therapy is remarkable.
