A Mississippi child born with HIV has now been "functionally cured" after being on aggressive treatment for two years.
A baby girl born in Mississippi was found to have HIV in her blood at birth. She was immediately put on antiretroviral therapy within hours of being born and after two years of being under an unusually aggressive treatment regimen, is reported "functionally cured."
Doctors confirmed at a medical conference in Atlanta Sunday that the infant's virus was now in check without medication. However, trace amounts of HIV are still present in her blood. According to an article by The Washington Post, if researchers could find that similar treatments are effective on other infants too, it could help save over 1,000 babies that are born with HIV everyday all over the world, especially Africa.
"If there is a trial that shows this can happen again, then this will be very important," said Dr. Karin Nielsen, a pediatrician who specializes in infectious diseases at UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine and not involved in the girl's case. "You'll be able to treat people very intensively and reverse the disease."
Dr. Deborah Persaud, a virologist at Johns Hopkins Children's Center, who described the Mississippi patient at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, said that their next step would be to an attempt to replicate the results in other HIV-positive infants.
"Is it possible the child was not infected? Yes. Is it likely? No," said Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases. The virus probably could not have remained in the baby's body as long as it had if she had not been infected, he said.
In most developed countries including the U.S., more than 98 percent of babies born to mothers with HIV do not get the virus. In the case of the Mississippi girl baby, the pregnant mother didn't know of her infection until she took a screening test when she was already in labor. Hence, preventive treatments were not given to the expecting mother and her child, said Dr. Hannah Gay, the pediatric HIV specialist at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson who treated the baby.
