Medical technology recently had a huge breakthrough when doctors reported that they cured a two and a half year old girl with HIV at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. "I'm sort of holding my breath that this child's virus doesn't come back in the future," says Hannah Gay. Gay is an associate professor of pediatrics at the university’s medical center. Gay and other doctors are hopeful that this remarkable accomplishment could lead to the curing of many more babies.
Gay claims that the girl’s mother tested HIV-positive when she arrived at the hospital to give birth, but she hadn’t had prenatal care or anti-HIV therapy. Also the baby was born too quickly for the doctors to administer any therapy before birth.
According to Katherine Luzuriaga, the study co- author of the University of Massachusetts’ Medical School, the baby contracted HIV at birth. However, Luzuriaga said that the doctors’ suspicions that the baby would be infected prompted them to administer anti-AIDS therapy the day after birth. She also claimed that it’s routine of doctors to treat HIV-positive pregnant women with anti-retroviral medications and give preventive treatment to babies for the first six weeks of life.
Gay said that the anti-retroviral therapy reduced the mother to child transmission from 25%-30% to less than two percent. Also, Luzuriaga says that this child has been HIV free ten months after receiving the treatment.
According to Anthony Fauci, a director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, Timothy Brown was the first man to be cured of AIDS. Brown was diagnosed of leukemia and as a result, received a bone marrow transplant in 2006. The transplant contained a genetic mutation which protects people from HIV. Brown remains disease free to this day. Fauci also claims that two other people appear to have been cured (http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/03/03/first-cure-hiv-child/1957943/?kjnd=YnsId4Mqho4YjFXeCGbaw78frjZnOf1lhXDkaKnovGMeehs212sUftC6SvCktKMG-ab328344-1bf5-442f-9a32-12fec0097304_xn7MA3SJyfjneys0F%2FYEsmRgMzl9UlWJLVx2U6LPGdUt31qX2FkFfNAOcnUqcz5t).
These cases of HIV/ AIDS cures are huge landmarks in the technology of medicine when at one point this disease was considered incurable. At one point, it was considered a medical accomplishment to increase the lifespan of HIV- AIDS infected patient. Perhaps the healthcare industry is on the verge of being able to find a cure that could work for all infected patients.
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