Two and a half years ago a baby was born to an HIV-infected mother and tested positive for the virus. Within thirty hours, the attending doctor gave the baby a three-drug dose of antiviral medication.
It has been over a year since the baby stopped receiving antiviral medication. She is still HIV free.
The news was announced last Sunday in the 2013 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Atlanta, which marks the second known case of a person being freed from HIV. The first patient, Timothy Brown of San Francisco, underwent a bone marrow transplant to replace his defensive cells with an immune version from a donor. Such a treatment is highly costly, as well as being unsuitable for a widespread cure for large a number of issues.
However, the child was treated using common medications, with no prior planning save routine tests and the attending doctor's quick action. Dr. Hannah Gay is credited with the cure and it is believed that the speed and intensity of the treatment helped to destroy the virus before it can form hidden reservoirs in the child's immune cells. After the formation of reservoirs - virus DNA hidden in the genetic code of a patient's infected cells - conventional treatment can take up to seventy years of steady treatment to remove HIV completely.
While Dr. Gay's treatment does not work on longtime patients or those who have been infected through other means aside from in-utero, it does present a very possible way to stop mother-child transmission, of which almost a thousand cases happen daily, most of them in the developing world.
Research is now underway to see if this method can be applied to other newborns.
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