04.03.13
Child cured of HIV, say American doctors
American doctors and scientists have ‘effectively cured’ a child born with HIV.
The two-and-a-half year old infant needs no treatment and is very unlikely to be infectious, in a case which makes medical history.
Doctors only realised its mother was HIV-positive during labour, and gave the baby a powerful combination of three antiretrovirals almost immediately after birth. Within a month of starting therapy, the level of HIV in the baby's blood had fallen so low that routine lab tests failed to detect it.
Details of the Mississippi child’s case were announced on Sunday at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Atlanta.
Dr Rowena Johnston, vice president and director of research at amfAR, the foundation for AIDS research, said: “Given that this cure appears to have been achieved by antiretroviral therapy alone it is also imperative that we learn more about a newborn’s immune system, how it differs from an adult's, and what factors made it possible for the child to be cured.”
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