Baby Thought Cured of HIV Now Showing Signs of Infection

[niemand88f]

Mississippi Child Thought Cured Of HIV Shows Signs Of Infection

A baby who generated great excitement last year because it appeared she had been cured of HIV is infected with the virus after all, health officials say.

This discovery is a setback for the child known as the "Mississippi baby." It also complicates efforts to test what had seemed like a promising new treatment for infants born with HIV.

The was born to an HIV-positive mother in 2012. The mother had not received prenatal care, so wasn't identified as being positive for HIV until she was in labor. To stop the baby's infection, doctors tried an aggressive combination of drugs right after she was born.

The news from Mississippi generated a lot of optimism. But , who had treated the baby at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, remained on the lookout for HIV infection.

"Ever since we discovered this case in 2012, we've known that was a possibility," she said in a conference call yesterday.

The baby was not put back on anti-HIV drugs, but doctors kept checking her for signs of infection every six to eight weeks. More than two years elapsed with no sign of the virus.

"So, last week was one of those regularly scheduled visits," Gay said. "The child came; she had no abnormalities on physical exam."

But blood tests showed that the baby had an active HIV infection. The virus had emerged from some mysterious hiding place in her body.

"It felt very much like a punch to the gut," Gay said. "It was extremely disappointing."

"We had been very hopeful that this would lead to bigger and better things," she said. And she also is disappointed "for the sake of the child, who is now back on medicine and expected to stay on medicine for a very long time."

Based on the child's story, the National Institutes of Health had planned a huge study involving more than 700 other HIV-infected newborns. The strategy is to treat them with a powerful drug combination at birth and, assuming they show no signs of infection, take them off drugs altogether at the age of 2.

"The study is still in play," says , director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. "But we're now just taking a close look at it ... to make sure that with the study we do it in an ethically sound way, and we get some answers to important questions."

But bioethicist , at Boston University's School of Public Health, says in his view this study will not pass ethical muster.

"To the extent that the justification for doing the trial is this one HIV-free child, and now it turns out that the child does have HIV, the trial should be stopped," he told NPR.

Annas says we have an extra ethical duty to children.

"We can't put them essentially in harm's way without some very good reason to think that they're going to benefit."

The study designers will have to grapple with that issue as they continue to look for ways to treat children facing a hard future with HIV infections.

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I was sad when I heard this coming home from work. There was so much hope & excitement about this case, and turns out the virus might have been there all along.

[anonymous]

The latent pools of Virus are very big focus of current HIV research. I pray there is a breakthrough

[mmp]

This breaks my heart for the baby and the potential breakthrough this was to be.

[sushi]

This news depresses me more than an svu marathon.

[ringstrue]

Dammit.

[cinnamoncox]

Shit. I just read about this elsewhere and it said the mother stopped giving her the medicine at some point "for unknown reasons".
So is it that the treatment doesn't work, or is it that she stopped receiving the treatment that was working?

So sad. Poor baby

[meshaliuknits]

Boo

Sent from my EVO

[laurenpetro]

i almost find it more interesting that the virus was able to hide so well and then reappear after years of dormancy than anything else.

[twohearted]

From a previous article about the child:


But Dr. Scott Hammer, an HIV researcher at Columbia University in New York, is not quite convinced. "Is the child cured of HIV infection? The best answer at this moment is a definitive 'maybe,' " Hammer writes in a New England Journal editorial that accompanied the report.

The reason is that a couple of tests done when the child was about 2 years old found indications that her system may contain pieces of RNA or DNA from HIV. This hints that some of the nucleic acid building blocks of the virus are hanging around within her blood cells.

There's no evidence these "proviral" remnants are capable of assembling themselves into whole viruses that can make copies of themselves. But researchers are concerned about that possibility and how it might be headed off.

"The question is whether those viral nucleic acids have the ability at some point to replicate and allow a rebound of the virus," Luzuriaga acknowledges. "That's why it's important to continue to test the baby over time." She says that means years.

[gpw]

Jul 11, 2014 12:07:11 GMT -5 laurenpetro said:

i almost find it more interesting that the virus was able to hide so well and then reappear after years of dormancy than anything else.

From what I remember about my HIV test clinic volunteer days, it's all about viral load.  One's viral load spikes at the time you're infected and then again when you're entrenched in full blown AIDS.  In the in between time, it can fluctuate, depending on your health, and can sometimes be so low as to now show up on tests.  My understanding is it never goes away, just dips to low to detect (not really "hide").  I think this is why Magic Johnson has been known to say he's "cured"; because his viral load is low enough as to not be detected in the tests.  

I have been out of that community for YEARS, though, and a million things have happened since then, so my information may be complete crap.  

[niemand88f]

Jul 11, 2014 11:51:06 GMT -5 cinnamoncox said:

Shit. I just read about this elsewhere and it said the mother stopped giving her the medicine at some point "for unknown reasons".
So is it that the treatment doesn't work, or is it that she stopped receiving the treatment that was working?

So sad. Poor baby

The mother brought the baby in several months after stopping the treatment that the doctors had ordered at birth. After the lapse in treatment, the baby tested negative consistently for a long time- that is what lead them to believe a huge dose of anti-HIV drugs at birth might have gotten rid of it. They did not restart any treatment until this new positive test.