LATEST UPDATE:
Baby Who Had Been "Cured" Of HIV Now Has The Virus ResurfacingThe Mississippi baby who had been
"functionally cured" of her HIV infection now
has detectable levels of virus. It's a sad turn
of events, but not necessarily a surprising
one.
You can read more about the Mississippi
case in Popular Science's 2013 explainer. In
short, the baby received an aggressive
course of standard anti-retroviral treatment
just 30 hours after she was born. Then,
because her mother stopped bringing her to
the doctor, she didn't get treated for a few
months. Yet once doctors saw her again,
they found no evidence that HIV was
replicating in her blood—an unprecedented
result. So researchers began hoping that
perhaps aggressive early treatment could
help other babies born with HIV. They set up
a clinical trial to test this.
At the same time, the Mississippi baby's
doctors did find fragments of HIV DNA in her
blood, a sign that she could still be infected.
Commentators warned how unlikely it
was this was a true, lifelong cure. Surely the
girl's doctors knew this, too. It was a watch-
and-wait situation, but everyone was
hopeful.
Now, the girl is almost four years old and
she's having "an unequivocal relapse" with
significant numbers of virus in her blood, as
AIDS expert Dr. Anthony Fauci told the New
York Times. Her caretakers can still manage
the virus with anti-retrovirals, but if her
infection is like others' and HIV treatments
don't improve, she'll take those drugs for the
rest of her life. That's not a terrible fate—
many folks in the U.S. live with HIV—but it
has its challenges.
Researchers will now reconsider how they'll
run the clinical trial they set up for other
babies born with HIV, the New York Times
reports.
Source:
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