JUDY WOODRUFF: Theres been a big disappointment in the hope to find a cure for AIDS. It involves a young child who was thought to have been cured of HIV as a baby.

JEFFREY BROWN: It was in March of last year that doctors thought they might have made a breakthrough in the goal of finding a cure for AIDS, treating a baby girl in Mississippi with early and unusually aggressive drug therapy.

The mother had HIV and had not been treated during pregnancy. But the girl was treated within 30 hours of her birth and was free of the virus for two years. Doctors allowed her to stay off therapy and, still, there were no signs of HIV returning.

But, yesterday, officials announced that the girl, now almost 4, had tested positive for HIV during a follow-up visit last week.

Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases joins me now.

And welcome back to you.

This is something that you and I talked about when the news came out last year. So, remind us first why this seemed so hopeful, how this early and aggressive treatment promised such a difference.

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases: Well, it promised such a difference because what happened with this particular baby was an unusual situation, that the baby had been on therapy, this aggressive form that you correctly described, for about 18 months, but then was lost to follow-up.

And the mother discontinued the therapy because she just dropped out of the out of the health care system, came back five months later, and when the physicians examined the baby, they found out that they couldnt find the virus anywhere by the standard methods of looking for virus, no virus in the plasma and no virus in the cells in the blood.

So they decided that this possibly could have been a cure related to the fact that the baby was treated very early, as you mentioned, within 30 hours, and aggressively. As it turned out, they followed the baby very, very carefully, and over a period of 27 months without any therapy at all, there was no indication at all of any virus in the baby. There was no plasma viremia, as we say, namely virus in the blood.

Go here to read the rest:
HIV rebound in young child is another step in long process of AIDS research

Comments are closed.