A baby with HIV is cured. The little girl is a miracle -- only the second person ever to be cured from the human immune-deficiency virus. On March 3, the Wall Street Journal reported that the 2.5-year-old is now cured after being treated with "an aggressive regimen of drugs" starting when she was just hours old.
"The new case was discovered after the baby girl's mother stopped treatment on her, and doctors realized that the virus was undetectable even without drugs, which HIV patients normally must take for the rest of their lives," the Wall Street Journal reported. This case is not to say that a cure for HIV has been discovered, but that, perhaps, aggressive treatment in newborns could lead to a cure for those patients over time.
The baby with HIV was cured after over two years of treatment. The World Health Organization does not have guidelines that support a more intense medication for newborns, but that could change after more research is conducted. This baby is a rare case, but her reaction to the drugs is definitely promising.
The baby will be monitored by doctors to ensure that her levels remain normal and that she doesn't have any more complications. Doctors feared that they had been treating the baby for the past several months without cause, but tests did reveal that the baby had HIV throughout her treatment -- up until her most recent test.
The baby with HIV who is now cured did, in fact, get the disease from her mother. The mother did not have prenatal care and didn't know her HIV status. According to the report, "a rapid HIV test after the birth revealed that [the mother] was infected."
© Effie Orfanides 2013
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