Second HIV-Infected American Baby is Infection-Free After Early AIDS Treatment

Results of AIDS treatment are very promising. Four hours after her birth, a baby born with HIV in Los Angeles, has been given early AIDS treatment, and all signs point to her infection being put into remission. It could be very possible that she is completely cured. She is the second baby born with HIV in the United States that has been given early treatment for the dreaded disease. Her case was revealed by doctors on Wednesday at the AIDS conference held in Boston.

First case

The first case of early treatment was a baby from Mississippi. The early treatment of the first baby and her response to the treatment were the encouraging signs that allowed the doctors of the second baby to follow the early treatment procedure. The case of the first baby was also a first for the medical community.

In the United States, mothers who are infected with HIV are given AIDS medicine while they are pregnant. This is to prevent them from passing the virus to the child. The first baby’s mother only discovered she had HIV when she was already in labor. She did not have any prenatal care. Doctors believed her baby was at risk and immediately administered treatment 30 hours after her birth, even without getting the test results yet. She received treatment for 18 months then she no longer came back. She returned 10 months later and her test results were very good. Even if she was not given any AIDS medicine during the time that the doctors lost contact with her, she remained infection-free.

The baby is already 3 1/2 years old now. She has been off medication for two years and it looks like she is now free of the HIV virus.

Second case

The baby from Los Angeles is still undergoing a series of multiple and sophisticated tests. By the looks of it, all the results show that she is clear of the virus, according to a physician who is the leader of the team administering the tests, Dr. Deborah Persaud of Johns Hopkins University.

Her mother has HIV but does not take her AIDS medicines. Doctors at Miller Children’s Hospital in Long Beach gave her AIDS drug when she went into labor. Like the first case, the baby from L.A. was infected. That was a year ago and according to the latest tests, she does not seem to be infected any longer but will continue treatment. She has been placed in foster care and is very healthy.

The results of aggressive early treatment are very promising. Dr. Yvonne Bryson, who is one of the heads of the federally-funded study on very early treatment for HIV infection, will be closely monitoring some 60 babies in the U.S. and other parts of the world that will be part of the study. She said the tests will be discontinued, possibly after two years if the results show that active infection is gone.

Photo credit: Taken by Kurt Nordstrom under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.