HIV-Infected Infant Cured With Early Use of AIDS Drugs

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/mar/03/us-doctors-cur...

and New York Times article

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/04/health/for-first-time-baby...

just submitted to HN

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5315660

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5315673

make clear that this is a very unusual case. The baby's HIV infection was acquired from an infected mother, but her HIV status was not known until she was in labor. Because she did not receive the usual preventive treatment given to HIV-positive pregnant women, the baby received three-drug therapy rather than one-drug therapy as the baby's treatment began after birth. The baby's current status of no detectable infection after a hiatus in drug therapy is a very unusual outcome. It's unclear how likely it is that this result could be reproduced in other patients. Thousands of failures to attain the same outcome have already happened all around the world.

From the Bloomberg article submitted to open this thread:

"The baby, whose identity has been kept anonymous, began taking a regimen of AIDS drugs about 30 hours after she was born at a rural Mississippi hospital, doctors said today at a medical meeting in Atlanta. At 18 months, the mother took the child off the medication. With no signs of the virus for 10 months, the infant was deemed 'functionally cured,' researchers said.

. . . .

"The baby’s treatment combined lamivudine and zidovudine, both sold by GlaxoSmithKline Plc’s joint venture with Pfizer Inc., ViiV Healthcare, and Abbott Laboratories’ Kaletra."

From the New York Times article:

"If the report is confirmed, the child born in Mississippi would be only the second well-documented case of a cure in the world, giving a boost to research aimed at a cure, something that only a few years ago was thought to be virtually impossible.

"The first person cured was Timothy Brown, known as the 'Berlin patient,' a middle-aged man with leukemia who received a bone-marrow transplant from a donor genetically resistant to H.I.V. infection."

From the Guardian article:

"Children infected with HIV are given antiretroviral drugs with the intent to treat them for life, and Gay warned that anyone who takes the drugs must remain on them.

"'It is far too early for anyone to try stopping effective therapy just to see if the virus comes back,, she said."

AFTER EDIT: Following up on some of the other top-level comments here, gojomo asks how the case reported in this thread differs from Magic Johnson's condition. Magic Johnson has consistently taken his antiretroviral drugs, which were first developed only shortly before his HIV infection was diagnosed, throughout the decades since he was diagnosed. He has never had a hiatus in treatment. What's remarkable about the case reported today is that the baby's treatment was stopped at about age eighteen months, but the child still has no detectable HIV infection.

I remember all too well when AIDS was a sure death sentence. The development of effective antiretroviral drugs in the early 1990s was a huge surprise. Even today, there are very few drugs that are effective against any kind of viral infection (although there are many vaccines that kind prevent viral infections, and smallpox has been completely eliminated from humankind).

Another comment asked about cures for diseases announced in recent years. For the most part, reductions in disease risk are gradual, mostly from accumulation of better practice in treatment and prevention. But the death rate from all causes of death at all ages is steadily declining in the developed world,

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=longevity-w...

and has been throughout my lifetime. For more than a century, humankind has been gaining life expectancy at the steady rate of fourth months per year (or one extra day of life for each day you live),

http://www.prb.org/Journalists/Webcasts/2010/humanlongevity....

http://www.demographic-challenge.com/files/downloads/2eb51e2...

http://www.pnas.org/content/105/36/13274.full

so a girl born in the last decade in the developed world has a better than even chance to living to age 100.

Anyway, the doctors don't make any absolutely definitive statements, but:

"Now, after at least one year of taking no medicine, this child's blood remains free of virus even on the most sensitive tests available"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/mar/03/us-doctors-cur...

I wonder if the kid has the CCR5-Δ32 mutation, which seems to provide natural immunity against certain strains of HIV.