Doctors Strongly Recommend That All Pregnant Women To Have A Blood Test For HIV

Doctors Strongly Recommend That All Pregnant Women To Have A Blood Test For HIV.
A mollycoddle born two-and-a-half years ago in Mississippi with HIV is the in front box of a so-called "functional cure" of the infection, researchers announced Sunday. Standard tests can no longer uncover any traces of the AIDS-causing virus even though the child has discontinued HIV medication. "We think this is the first well-documented case of a functional cure," said consider lead author Dr Deborah Persaud, associate professor of pediatrics in the allotment of infectious diseases at Johns Hopkins Children's Center in Baltimore. The finding was presented Sunday at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, in Atlanta.

The teenager was not part of a study but, instead, the beneficiary of an unexpected and partly unplanned set of events that - once confirmed and replicated in a established study - might help more children who are born with HIV or who at risk of contracting HIV from their protect eradicate the virus from their body. Normally, mothers infected with HIV take antiretroviral drugs that can almost kill the odds of the virus being transferred to the baby. If a mother doesn't advised of her HIV status or hasn't been treated for other reasons, the baby is given "prophylactic" drugs at birth while awaiting the results of tests to infer his or her HIV status.

This can take four to six weeks to complete. If the tests are positive, the spoil starts HIV drug treatment. The mummy of the baby born in Mississippi didn't know she was HIV-positive until the time of delivery.

But in this case, both the prime and confirmatory tests on the baby were able to be completed within one day, allowing the baby to be started on HIV cure treatment within the first 30 hours of life. "Most of our kids don't get picked up that early". As expected, the baby's "viral load" - detectable levels of HIV - decreased progressively until it was no longer detectable at 29 days of age.

Theoretically, this boy (doctors aren't disclosing the gender) would have enchanted the medications for the be of his or her life, said the researchers, who included doctors from the University of Massachusetts Medical School and the University of Mississippi Medical Center. Instead, the youngster stayed on the regimen for only 18 months before dropping out of the medical technique and discontinuing the drugs.

Ten months after stopping treatment, however, the laddie was again seen by doctors who were surprised to find no HIV virus or HIV antibodies with principle tests. Ultrasensitive tests did detect infinitesimal traces of viral DNA and RNA in the blood. But the virus was not replicating - a decidedly unusual occurrence given that drugs were no longer being administered, the researchers said.

No one is unexceptionally sure why this child achieved a "functional" repair - meaning the virus is in remission even without medications. But investigators believe that giving antiviral curing so early in life meant the virus had no time to create viral "reservoirs" where dormant HIV cells can dally for years before becoming active again. "For us this is a very exciting finding. By treating a cosset very early we may be able to prevent viral reservoirs or cells that stay around for a lifetime of an infected person".

But Dr Michael Horberg, armchair of the HIV Medicine Association and director of HIV/AIDS at Kaiser Permanente, stressed that this was a "functional medicament and not a cure in the most classic sense of the word. If we read adults off HIV medications, they almost certainly within a short time period would have levels of virus back to where they were before they were taking medication".

Only one example of a "sterilizing cure" - when there are absolutely no traces of HIV in the body - has been documented. This occurred in the supposed "Berlin patient," who received a bone marrow transplant for leukemia. The transplanted cells came from a contributor who had a rare genetic mutation that increases immunity against the most common put up of HIV. The Berlin patient has remained HIV-free after discontinuing drug therapy.

And Persaud said she is not advocating that the Mississippi victim become the standard of care. "This is a single case and we don't genuinely know what are all of the factors involved ". But the case does "pave the way now for us to in a second start clinical studies to see if we can replicate these findings in more infants". Those trials are eager to move forward.

At the last follow-up, the child born in Mississippi was "doing well and was healthy". Horberg said the findings in the child were "encouraging" but "time will tell" if such a strategy can keep the virus under hold back for long periods of time without medication.

He emphasized that there are ways to prevent a baby from becoming infected in the chief place. "This again shows the importance of testing pregnant mothers and getting them into care and on stupefy treatment such that we wouldn't even need to worry about it at this point. What's encouraging, though, if it does come to this point, we might have some groovy treatment options" breast. The research presented Sunday was funded by the US National Institutes of Health and the American Foundation for AIDS Research.