Scientists claim, a child in US functionally cured of HIV

A child treated for Hiv (HIV/ AIDS) ,in Mississippi continues to be claimed to be “functionally cured”(a condition whenever a patient achieves and maintains long-termviralremission without lifelong treatment and standard studies fail to detect HIV replication within the blood. However,it is likely that the minute amount of the virus remains in your body) after being exposed to the virus during birth. The kid was given standard anti-retroviral (ARV) drug therapy within 30 hours of birth whichled to undetectable amounts of virus in the body, 29 days after birth. This is actually the 2nd such case ,theonly documented case of the actual cure was those of an adult in Germany (Timothy Ray Brown) who had bone marrow transplant, there was several such instances of “non-progressors” who was simply exposed tothe virus but seem “naturally resistant.”

The study team behind this project included Johns Hopkins Children’s Centre virologist Deborah Persaud, University of Massachusetts School of medicine immunologist Katherine Luzuriaga, and University of Mississippi Medical Centre paediatric HIV specialist Hannah Gay. The findings could imply “prompt antiviral therapy in newborns that begins within times of exposure may help infants pay off the virus and achieve long-term remission without lifelong treatment by preventing viral hideouts from forming to begin with in the body as in the case of adults who don't realise they were being infected by the time they did, these were already highly infected. In this instance however, infection was caught early, potentially as the virus was still entering the baby’s system and so the doctors supplied the ARVs instead of cases where adults have been infected for a while.

However scientists claim are cautious when it comes to generalising these results and emphasised this may be a single, anecdotal case because it was not a “controlled randomised trial”. Further “Complete viral eradication on the large scale is long-term goal which might come from aggressive, timely and precisely targeted utilization of antiviral therapies in high-risk newborns in an effort to achieve functional cure.” The result of ARVs is to suppress and slow the progress from the infection rather than act as a “sterilising cure,” that is a complete eradication of all viral traces in the body. Prevention really is the very best cure, and it is already proven strategy that 98 percent of newborn infections could be prevented by identifying and treating HIV-positive women that are pregnant.