Doctors Cure An HIV Positive Baby So Their's Hope

[Renegade]

For Worldwide, about 1,000 babies are born with HIV each day. There's new reason to be hopeful about their future. I'm still surprised Magic Johnson is still alive aswell. I thought they cured him? If you read below you'll find out that if you have access to the treatment you can live a near normal life span.

Two and a half years ago, a woman arrived at a rural Mississippi hospital in labor, unaware that she was infected with HIV and reportedly having received no prenatal care. The baby girl was born prematurely, and doctors tested her for HIV. But before the tests even came back positive, doctors put the baby on an aggressive treatment of three antiretroviral drugs, starting 30 hours after birth. After about a month, the girl's viral levels had dropped to the level of almost being undetectable. After 15 months the treatment became sporadic, and after 18 months, the mother stopped bringing the girl in altogether, meaning the medication stopped. Doctors expected the level of HIV to shoot up after the treatment ended, but when the girl returned five months later, the virus was still undetectable.

The girl's pediatrician, Dr. Hannah Gay, roped in virologist Deborah Persaud at Johns Hopkins Children's Center, and Persaud and Dr. Katherine Luzuriaga, an immunologist at University of Massachusetts Medical School, performed sophisticated blood tests and discovered trace amounts of HIV remnants but none capable of replicating. That makes Gay's early, aggressive treatment a "functional cure," Persaud says— at least for this one toddler.

The girl isn't the first patient functionally cured of AIDS — but she's only the second verifiable case. And the first, a middle-aged man named Timothy Brown, became HIV-free when he received a leukemia-related bone-marrow transplant from a donor genetically resistant to the virus. "For pediatrics, this is our Timothy Brown," says Dr. Persaud. "It's proof of principle that we can cure HIV infection if we can replicate this case."

But there are unique aspects of this case that other "experiments will struggle to replicate, ethically," says James Hamblin at The Atlantic. First, "we don't have good studies on giving infants all-out antiretroviral treatments, which can be toxic, until after we get results from blood tests that indicate they've definitely been infected." And there's the issue of taking the children off the medication after 18 months, which could cause the virus to return with a vengeance if this case was a fluke. But even though "one case is one case," the result is "great for this kid, and a day that should live in history and inspire progress."

And even if doctors can get this treatment to work in other HIV-positive newborns, "one thing is certain — this approach is not going to provide a cure for the vast majority of people with HIV," says James Gallagher at BBC News. Once someone is fully infected, the virus hides in the patient's DNA, making it virtually impossible to treat. One theory is that the drugs wiped out the HIV in the girl before the virus had a chance to hide, leading some skeptics to argue that maybe she wasn't "cured."


If you want to read more about this feel free to go to this link below.

http://news.yahoo.com/doctors-cure-h...102200731.html

[trewyn15]

I saw this too, pretty crazy and pretty awesome!

[Renegade]

Originally Posted by trewyn15

I saw this too, pretty crazy and pretty awesome!

wrap it up.

[BloodRain]

Would have been cured years ago if not for corporate/big pharma greed.

[12 ZL1 #1725]

Interesting....

[Renegade]

Originally Posted by BloodRain

Would have been cured years ago if not for corporate/big pharma greed.

people won't get the treatment needed for years to come. Until they cough up blood or money first.