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Baby with HIV cured: U.S. doctors said they cured a baby who was born with HIV, the first time it has been documented.
Serey,7, (C) sits with other children with their parents infected with AIDS wait to be seen by a doctor at the National Pediatric Hospital out patient clinic at the National Pediatric Hospital for HIV/AIDS Feb. 12, 2010 in Phnom Penh. (Paula Bronstein /Getty Images)
American doctors said on Sunday that they made history when they cured a baby who was born with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. It was the first time that such a case was documented.
The unnamed baby, around 2 and a half years old, was given a large number of drugs over her lifetime.
“I’m sort of holding my breath that this child’s virus doesn’t come back in the future,” Hannah Gay, an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, told USA Today. She helped treat the Mississippi girl, who now needs no medication for HIV and likely will not infect others, doctors have said.
“I’m certainly very hopeful that it will produce studies that will show us a way to cure other babies in the future,” Gay said.
Medical staff were not clear exactly why the treatment was effective, but the case raised hopes for the millions of other people around the world living with the virus. The researchers started treating the baby around 30 hours after birth.
“We expect that this baby has great chances for a long, healthy life. We are certainly hoping that this approach could lead to the same outcome in many other high-risk babies,” Gay told The Guardian.
However, researchers said that the case involves just one patient, a baby girl, and their findings might not impact people who contracted HIV as an adult, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Over the past two decades in developed countries, the number of babies who are born with HIV has fallen dramatically due to better drugs and prevention plans.
But the problem remains high in developing countries, namely in sub-Saharan Africa, where around 387,500 children under the age of 14 have the virus and were receiving antiretroviral therapy in 2010, according to the Guardian. Around 2 million children of the same age in the region need the same drugs.
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