Child cured of HIV

I don't think treating people with anti-retroviral drugs is going to be the 'revolutionary answer' that people are looking for. But, maybe it will lead to some discovery about immune systems acting differently in children and then may lead to a breakthrough for a general cure.
 
Was just reading this. Article itself says thus method won't be a general solution...

E:sorry, I was reading guardian article from google news I think.
 
Last edited:
dbmzk1 said:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-21651225

Interesting.

This would be the 2nd person to ever be cured of HIV, the first being a dude in Germany back in July.

Could this be a major step forward, or did she get lucky?

Also the doctor is called Hannah Gay... had to laugh!
Click to expand...

How could it be a major step forward? She was treated with standard drug therapy. I'm asking this as a genuine question as I think I'm missing something.

With only two recorded cases of people being cured of HIV I'd say this is more of a very very rare occurrence given that this case represents a cure rate of 0.00006% of people living with HIV in the US alone.
 
She will be worth billions to the bio weapons division, if we are smart we can all come out of this heroes and we can be set up for life.


Sensibly though, that's great news for for the lass, it must have been a awful prospect living under the cloud of HIV.
 
There is already people immune to HIV.
This could help development of drugs for a cure but I wouldnt hold your breath.
 
Hardly revolutionary, but a (supposed) cure is a cure. Shall have to wait and see how the child goes. Development of antiretrovirals, let alone vaccines is beyond complicated, so if exceptionally early treatment with preexisting meds is a feasible option, then that is certainly worth investigating. Life-long antiretrovirals really aren't pleasant, as the drugs can have some nasty side effects, so it's a huge let-off if it can be made to work in this manner. I fail to believe it hasn't been tried before, though. Well I'd be very surprised, anyway!

It likely depends on the route of transmission, though. I think the evidence suggests that around 1/4 of transmissions are in utero, with the majority occurring at birth or neonatally. For the latter two options, this is essentially following the routine for exposure in a clinical environment (e.g. needle p-rick (thanks, *** system)), which is a rapid short term antiretroviral course. 30 hours is longer than you'd hope for under these situations (!), but nevertheless, if you don't try, you don't get.

I'm a retrovirologist, but I don't actually know a huge amount about the HIV field. I'm going to a couple of big conferences in the US in April and May though, which should be quite an eye-opener :D
 
Last edited:
Ghz6Ge0.jpg
 
Interesting that the other person that was 'cured', had to have his immune system destroyed before having stem cell treatment.

WIN for the baby :-) Must have been hell for her though on all those drugs :-(
 
valkynaz said:
How could it be a major step forward? She was treated with standard drug therapy. I'm asking this as a genuine question as I think I'm missing something. [..]
Click to expand...

She's had no treatment for at least a year and tests come back negative for HIV. That's a cure, which is very different to the usual effects of the standard treatment. The standard treatment suppresses the progression of infection. It doesn't cure it. The patient is still HIV+

There are a few possibilities:

1) During the 5 months in which the mother took the child somewhere for some reason, a full cure was made in some way. Magic, illegal medical experiments, whatever.

2) For some currently unknown reason, the standard drug therapy cured this specific individual and would have done so under any circumstances because of something unusual about her.

3) The standard drug therapy cured her because it was started when she was 1 day old.

The currently pencilled in hypothesis is the third one. It's thought that established HIV infections form reservoirs of infection that the standard drug treatment can't kill off but that this extremely early treatment kills the HIV off before the reservoirs are formed. If so, it might be possible to cure other people born HIV+. Maybe it would work for all people born HIV+ Maybe it will lead to a better understanding of how HIV infection progresses in humans, which might lead to more effective treatments and maybe even a general cure.

So yeah, it's a major step forward. Unless the cure was a secret magic spell or illegal medical experiment during the time the child was outside the medical system, this is proof that it is possible to cure HIV in newborn babies. That could be a big deal.
 
dbmzk1 said:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-21651225

Interesting.

This would be the 2nd person to ever be cured of HIV, the first being a dude in Germany back in July.

Could this be a major step forward, or did she get lucky?

Also the doctor is called Hannah Gay... had to laugh!
Click to expand...

For every disease which is cured a new one is formed by those crazy scientists in America.
 
A different story but possibly another development...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-23132561

Two guys with HIV for the last 30 years developed lymphoma and so had a bone marrow transplant.

Since then, no detectable HIV has been found in their bloodstream so they have come off the anti-retroviral drugs earlier this year, and still no sign of any HIV return.

Too early to be definitive, but promising.
 
Should they be doing this? Imagine if HIV/Cancer/Aids/Any terminal illness was all cured and we get to a point where only old age is incurable?

How long would it be before the world becomes ever more populated and the global resources cannot cope with the influx of such a population increase?
By curing this kind of illness we are effectively giving two fingers to human nature and natural selection??

Obviously at a personal level it is gut wrenching knowing a family member/friend has cancer etc, and I've had a family member in the past who had cancer so can relate, I'm not completely heartless!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom