"**A baby girl in the US born with HIV appears to have been cured after very early treatment with standard drug therapy, doctors say.
**The Mississippi child is now two-and-a-half years old and has been off medication for about a year with no signs of infection.
More testing needs to be done to see if the treatment - given within hours of birth - would work for others. If the girl stays healthy, it would be the world’s second reported ‘cure’."
I think this is a huge step in the right direction but from what I understand the researchers/physicians don't understand themselves how this happened (ie the mechanism behind it all). So I doubt we will be seeing a 'cure' anytime soon.
Also it is important to note that the doctor decided to give this baby a higher amount of anti-virals than the normal protocol- before official diagnosis was made! Only on the basis that the baby was at high risk; possibly indicating that treating babies quickly and aggressively is critical.
One more thing, the reason they even figured out that this baby was 'cured' was because the baby hadn't been showing up to the doctor's for months and they wanted to see the virus load in the baby before they began treatment again. The patient (or the patient's mother) was the one that stopped medication therapy. I would assume doctors would be hesitant to stop their patient's therapy, because the virus can come back with a vengeance and be harder to control. I doubt many doctor's would want to take that risk..........
