Aids
Giving drugs within hours of HIV infection is not a cure, according to doctors treating a baby in Milan, Italy.
The newborn infant cleared the virus from their bloodstream, but HIV re-emerged soon after antiretroviral treatment stopped. Doctors had hoped rapid treatment would prevent HIV becoming established in the body.
Experts said there was “still some way to go” before a cure was found. Drug treatments have come a long way since HIV came to global attention in the 1980s and infection is no longer a death sentence.
However, antiretrovirals merely clear the virus from the bloodstream leaving reservoirs of HIV in other organs untouched. The hope was that acting before the reservoirs formed would be an effective cure has been defeated the re-emergence of virus after the cessation of the taking of the drug
Doctors at the University of Milan and the Don Gnocchi Foundation in the city have reported a case, in the Lancet medical journal, of a baby born to a mother with HIV in 2009. Drug treatment started shortly after birth and the virus rapidly disappeared from the bloodstream. HIV was undetectable at the age of three.
The doctors said: “In view of these results, and recent reports of apparent cure of HIV infection, and in agreement with the mother, we stopped antiretroviral therapy.” For one week everything seemed fine, but in the second week, after treatment stopped, the virus had returned.
