Tests suggest baby born with HIV may be cured | Hacker News Reader

Tests suggest baby born with HIV may be cured

news.yahoo.com

24 pointsshire7 comments

> Doctors won't call it a cure because they don't know what proof or how much time is needed to declare someone free of HIV infection, long feared to be permanent.

Original report in the New England Journal of Medicine: http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1302976

Summary: The child was born with HIV, from a mother with "relatively low viral load", and started on antiretroviral therapy 30 hours later, and continued for 20 months. (While not being breast feed, to avoid reinfection.) Resulting in controlled levels of HIV-1 viremia 18 months after treatment stopped. That sounds like early treatment being more successful, not a cure.

I also don't see a discussion about the potential long-term health issues caused by the treatment, although they do acknowledge the FDA has warnings against using some combinations of ART drugs for infants less than 14 days of age.

IANAD, but AFAIK, HIV tests check for antibodies: Your body's response to HIV. So how do they check that the virus is gone? AFAIK, the antibodies would remain in your system even if you killed the virus. I guess if the child didn't produce her own antibodies, then they'd be flushed out of her system eventually.

Are they looking at a lack of anti bodies to determine a lack of virus? Or, do they have a special test where they actually look for the virus? If the latter, why don't they use this test to determine if someone has HIV for everybody? I recall reading it takes up to 6 months for the antibodies to show up in your blood stream. If you could just look for the virus itself, wouldn't you know sooner?

You can use PCR to check for the presence of viral DNA or RNA (the "viral load"). It's a direct test for the virus and is relatively cheap.

I think that the antibody test is the quickest, but if money is no expense, the gold standard is probably to mix potentially-HIV-infected blood (and/or tissue samples from lymph nodes) with compatible "clean" blood and then look for evidence of active infection under a microscope or via some other exotic method.

The article suggests that no, there isn't a cure.

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