Early Drug Treatment Cures American Baby with HIV

It could be said that early detection and early medical intervention can cure a disease that even confounds medical experts. The proof is a baby girl from Mississippi who was born with HIV. She was given the standard drug therapy for the dreaded disease when she was barely 30 hours old. Now, two and a half years later, she appears to have no traces of the disease, given the battery of tests conducted by different sets of doctors.

HIV is one of those dreadful diseases that have no known definite cure yet. There are drugs that prevent the spread of the disease when detected early, where the patients could still lead an active life, although they still have to take the prescribed medicines regularly. In some cases it goes on remission, but there is still the fear that the disease could come back.

Early detection
Doctors who were treating the pregnant mother only knew that she was HIV positive when she went into labor. The doctors then agreed that since she had not received any treatment for the disease, it was highly probable that her baby would have acquired the disease, which could be very risky for the infant, as the threat of many types of infection is possible.

The mother was in a rural hospital where she was scheduled to give birth. Due to the findings that she was HIV positive and the potential danger her baby faces, the infant was transferred to the University of Mississippi Medical Center located in Jackson. There the baby was administered the standard HIV drugs by Dr. Hannah Gay, a pediatric HIV specialist. The baby was given the medication for 18 months but no longer came for treatment afterwards. Now two-and-a-half years old, the baby has resurfaced and tested.

Treatment
At barely 30 hours old, the baby girl was given an accelerated program of treatment. She received not just one but three standard HIV drugs. Doctors who have examined her now believed that the treatment they administered killed the virus and prevented it from attaching and growing in her cells.

Great results
The baby had been off medication for over a year and recent blood tests showed that it is in remission and that the presence of the virus is gone. For doctors and researchers on the disease, this is indeed groundbreaking news, because it proves that HIV in infants and other children can be cured as long as the virus is prevented from taking hold on the cells.

Declared free of the disease
Dr. Deborah Persaud, study leader of the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center located in Baltimore, Maryland, has declared that the baby is now free from the disease. It is relatively almost a cure, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Dr. Persaud presented these findings at the Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections Conference that was held in Atlanta. They have concluded that it is possible to treat HIV in infants and that at that stage the possibility of being cured is very high.

Documented cases
The baby’s treatment and its successful outcome is the first documented case of an infant treated for HIV at birth, and with such surprising and encouraging results. On the other hand, the first document case of an adult that was treated for HIV in 2007 is Timothy Ray Brown from San Francisco, California. However, he is an adult and the treatment that he received was very different from what the infant girl was given. Mr. Brown had a bone marrow transplant. The bone marrow donor was very special because the person is HIV-resistant. The process that he went through was similar to leukemia treatment, where his immune system was fully destroyed before he was given a stem cell transplant.

While these early results are encouraging, the toddler will still need to undergo several tests and medication to make sure that she is completely rid of the disease. In the same manner, prevention is still the best way to prevent the disease from spreading. Early and continuous treatment for those who are already infected is a must. On pregnant women, receiving treatment prior to giving birth and not breastfeeding will ensure that the infant will be HIV negative. But it is still better to avoid the risks of contracting the disease, instead of subjecting yourself and that of your child’s later.