Baby with HIV Cured 'Functionally' in Medical Breakthrough with 3 Anti-Viral Drugs (Video)
A 2-year-old girl from Mississippi is the first child to be "functionally cured" of HIV, researchers announced on March 3.
It is believed that intervention within 30 hours of birth and three anti-viral drugs were the reasons behind the cure, according to KDVR.
A "functional cure" occurs when the presence of the virus is so miniscule that lifelong treatment isn't necessary and standard clinical testing can't detect the virus in the blood stream. The respective findings were announced at the 2013 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Atlanta, Ga.
The toddler, whose name has not been revealed to the public, was born HIV-positive to a mother who received no prenatal care and wasn't diagnosed with HIV herself until just prior to giving birth.
"We didn't have the opportunity to treat the mom during the pregnancy as we would like to be able to prevent transmission to the baby," said Dr. Hannah Gay.
Gay, a pediatric HIV specialist at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, told CNN the treatment's timing may deserve "more emphasis than the particular drugs or number of drugs used."
"We are hoping that future studies will show that very early institution of effective therapy will result in this same outcome consistently," added Gay.
Dr. Katherine Luzuriaga, a University of Massachusetts immunologist who worked alongside Gay, called the medical breakthrough fascinating since it included the fact that the girl had no virus whatsoever in her blood even after her mother halted treatment for eight to 10 months.
"This is the very first case in which we've conclusively been able to document that the baby was infected and then after a period of treatment has been able to go off treatment without viral rebound," said Luzuriaga. "We started therapy as early as possible, which in this case was about 30 hours of age. And because it was a high-risk exposure, I decided to use three drugs rather than one."
