Mississippi Child Thought Cured of HIV Shows Signs of Infection | Hacker News Reader

Mississippi Child Thought Cured of HIV Shows Signs of Infection

npr.org

33 pointsesalazar21 comments

"But blood tests showed that the baby had an active HIV infection. The virus had emerged from some mysterious hiding place in her body." Could the child not have just simply been re-infected? The mother has a demonstrated history of lacking healthy habits.

This was exactly my thought.

"mysterious hiding place"

Mysterious? Do they not understand what a retrovirus is?

Nono, the point is that viruses like HIV infect a tiny subset of cells and "hide out" there. I think you're referring to genomic integration, and they're referring to cell type.

HIV and retreat to hiding places like the gut and the brain, where treatment is very difficult.

It's possible of course, but if you compare the two possible scenarios, one seems more likely than the other;

1) Child was infected with HIV twice

2) Groundbreaking never-before-achieved treatment didn't actually work

In the first, something extraordinary (being infected) has to happen twice, in the second, something extraordinary (being cured of HIV) has to simply not happen.

So it seems - on this basic, without-the-facts, examination at least - much more likely to be #2 than #1.

It should be pointed out that the child was removed from the study many months early. The other child who remained for the duration of the program is still HIV negative.

In the mid 20th century the polio virus was a serious health problem. But then came several different simple vaccines. They were highly effective, and polio quickly disappeared.

Now, after 50 years of incredible advances in medicine, we're still struggling to eradicate HIV. Incredibly tenacious bugger, isn't it?

Isn't everything? I don't think we've completely eradicated ANYTHING other than smallpox.

We've gotten smallpox and rinderpest, and we are getting close (a few hundred cases per year) on others, including Polio and Dracunculiasis.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eradication_of_infectious_disea...

It's a different problem, though. The solution to polio is known, and has been for decades. It's just ("just") a problem with implementation. Given sufficient resources, not all that much really, and polio could be gone in a year.

HIV, on the other hand, still has no cure nor vaccine. Even given, say, the entire GDP of the United States put towards solving it, there's no guarantee it could be wiped out.

HIV has very preventable transmission.

Given resources properly allocated you could potentially drastically lower the transmission rate.

Indeed, but i think it would be really hard to actually eliminate it entirely. Infected people can still live for decades with it and slip-ups happen, especially if the disease becomes much more rare and people stop thinking about it. In contrast, most of us will never be able to contract polio no matter what we do, because we're immunized.

There are also occasionally mass casualty events where some of the rigorous safety protocols are ignored in favor of saving lives. My home town of 55K was hit by an EF5 tornado, killing ~155, hospitalizing over 1,000, with I don't know how many outpatient wounded. And it trashed one of our two hospitals....

Read http://stormdoctor.blogspot.com/2011/06/first-response-mode-... for the ugly details, the relevant parts are:

"Almost all patients were covered in some form of debris which tended to accumulate in skin folds or in the ears or mouth. On more than one occasion, shards of glass cut my gloves (but thankfully, never me). The floor was covered in so much blood in places, that it was a matter of throwing down towels to minimize the risk of slipping and falling. All my career I’d been trained about fluid precautions to avoid transmission of disease, yet in Joplin that night, the ER was a fine mist of all kinds of fluids—infectious and non—and the only thing that mattered was forward motion."

Finished with an intense shift in ER, on his way to deal with uninjured patients evacuated from the other hospital:

"[...] then we hit the waiting room. There were hundreds of people, blood on every surface, bandages outnumbered clothes...."

And there were other places probably like that, e.g. lots of the personal of the other hospital set up operations in one of our main event venues.

Scary. And a good point. So much emphasis is placed on sexual transmission of HIV that it's easy to forget that there are other ways.

> There are also occasionally mass casualty events where some of the rigorous safety protocols are ignored in favor of saving lives.

This is an old comment now, but I remembered it when I read about the Ebola specialist contracting Ebola. It just goes to show that bad things can happen even to experienced experts in the field.

Note the only candidates for eradication are those without a non-human reservoir. I.e. smallpox and polio yes, influenza no. See the link a_c_s provided for more.

A big problem with HIV is that, being a retrovirus, it initially copies itself in the reverse of the usual direction. This RNA -> cDNA process requires reverse transcriptase[1], which is notorious for introducing errors. Even worse, the reverse transcriptase in HIV is particularly bad.

Rapidly changing targets are nasty....

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_transcriptase

Come on, we can't even fight the common flu and cold - I'm not even talking about the deadlier SARS, MERS, and other forms! Soon we won't be able to handle even bacterial infections due to our stupidity to abuse the antibiotics! Every time I get a sore throat, I think how hopeless we are! Yes, medicine has advanced in certain areas like on the butchery side, we understand some things better now, but we're so far from being in control! The overregulation, especially in the States, and trying to apply moral and other norms inappropriately, is threatening our existence, when the only moral that matters is survival. When I read labels bragging with "not tested on animals", I don't get. I love animals, but I put humans first! I'm sure First World pets live a much healthier and comfortable life than millions of Africans, let's say, but that's off-topic, sorry. So, should we test on humans or not test at all? We're so close to a virus or a bacteria eradicating the mankind, so, top priority should be putting all efforts on dealing with infectious diseases. I really don't get why Western medicine is not paying attention to Phage Therapy, that's been successfully used in USSR for nearly a century with great success. When I was a kid in Eastern Europe, although antibiotics were available and effective, immunoglobulin therapy was still used and was effective. When my son got an ear infection recently, the doctor didn't do culture and prescribed one antibiotic, it didn't work, she prescribed another, it didn't work either, she prescribed a third one - all this to save the cost of doing culture. All this at the expense of devastating my son's gut flora. Of course, we overloaded him with probiotics, but it's really hard to compensate for the damage done. In fact, there are many who believe the obesity and chronic disease pandemic is also due to antibiotics and damaged gut flora.

Your son had an outer ear infection?

Usually "ear infection" means internal. My point was that medicine is more gambling than precise science. I understand there are many strains, but just the fact that the doctor doesn't even want to test if it's viral or bacterial, is pretty discouraging as these two vastly different things and, yet, they treat with antibiotics still just to possibly prevent the secondary bacterial infection if it was primarily viral. Here's one solid take on how those should be treated instead: http://chriskresser.com/how-to-prevent-and-treat-recurring-e...

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