HIV diagnose is usually a bad or even the worse news, but for the first time in history, a baby girl born with the disease has been apparently cured of it. Although doctors are not sure how exactly they did it, clearly their unusually aggressive treatment completely freed the child of the virus.
Every year an estimated 330,000 children around the world are either born with HIV or get infected shortly after birth. As of 2011 globally there were around 3 million children living with the virus and until now these children were all considered permanently infected without any chance to be cured of the disease. More than half of those kids die within the first year, according to UCLA. But a baby treated with 3 different antiretroviral drugs at the University of Mississippi Medical Center about 30 hours after birth is now completely free of HIV. Usually doctors treat both the mother and the baby during the pregnancy in order to lower the viral levels in her blood, and then use a single antiretroviral medicine to prevent transmission after birth. But this Mississipi girl’s case really amazing – her mother didn’t even know she had HIV until the labour and wasn’t given any drugs at all, so the baby was in fact in very high risk of infection.
After the baby was born the doctors transferred her to University of Mississippi where Dr. Hannah Gay and her team began treatment coarse with three different drugs in the hope the baby will have a greater chance. In addition, Dr. Gay administered higher dosages of the powerful drugs. The doctors expected that the child would have to take the drugs until the end of her life, but unexpectedly for everyone, only a month after the treatment had started, the HIV levels in the blood were so low that couldn’t be detected by regular tests. For a period of about one year, the mother and the baby visited the medical center regularly but then stopped to come. Eventually, in more than a half year the mother and the baby showed up. At that point, Dr. Gay expected to find the girl’s blood overflowing with the virus, but there was no virus at all!
Ultra-sensitive tests at the University of Massachusetts followed but were able to find only pieces of HIV DNA and RNA without an evidence for viral replication. Mississippi baby girl is the first child and the second person in the world to have been cured for more than three decades of global HIV and AIDS pandemic. The first case was Timothy Brown from San Francisco, or the so-called Berlin patient, who went to Germany and received a donor immune system, a bone marrow transplant, to be precise. The donor was resistant to HIV, which is extremely rare, and it would be very difficult and complicated for the operation to be duplicated.
Doctors think about the reasons why the Mississippi girl’s treatment was so successful –most probably, it was because the virus was aggressive treated so shortly after birth. This treatment couldn’t allow the virus to attach to specific white blood cells that are able to conceal it for years. This means that this course of aggressive drugs will be effective only in babies, right after they are born, which for doctors, is a great hope for the future generations. Although the exact reasons and conclusions are about to be clarified in the future, scientists hope that this child’s case has showed a breakthrough approach towards treating HIV and AIDS.
