March 4 In History: A Baby In The US Recovered From HIV Within 30 Hours

Photo Illustrations (St Janko Ferlic / Unsplash)

JAKARTA - On March 4, 2013, a team of doctors in the United States (US) stated that a baby born with HIV had recovered. The baby recovered after being given three high doses of antiretroviral drugs within 30 hours of birth. Doctors had found out that her mother was HIV positive and gave her drugs in the hope of controlling the virus.

Cited from CNN, the baby from Mississippi was the first baby to "functionally recover" from HIV. Researchers believe early intervention with antiretroviral drugs is the key to this success. A "functional cure" is when the presence of the virus is very small, lifelong treatment is not required and standard clinical tests do not detect the presence of the virus in the blood.

The findings were announced at the 2013 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Atlanta. The unnamed baby girl was born HIV positive to her mother who did not receive prenatal care and was not diagnosed with HIV until near delivery.

"We don't have the opportunity to treat the mother during pregnancy to prevent transmission to the baby", said Dr. Hannah Gay, pediatric HIV specialist at the University of Mississippi Medical Center.

Gay said the timing of the intervention, or before the baby is diagnosed with HIV, may need more attention than determining the drug or the amount of drug being taken. "We hope future research will show that the earliest effective therapeutic institutions will produce consistently the same results", Gay added.

Dr. Katherine Luzuriaga, an immunologist at the University of Massachusetts who works with Gay, called the developments interesting, including the fact that the baby ended up not having HIV in its blood even after the mother stopped treating the baby for eight to 10 months.

After it was confirmed that the mother was HIV positive, Gay immediately started giving antiretroviral drugs to the baby when the baby was born in an effort to control HIV infection. "We started therapy as early as possible, which in this case was about 30 hours old", said the doctor. "And because it was a high-risk exposure, I decided to use three drugs instead of one".

Gay said, within a few days he got the results of the examination that the child was HIV positive. He said the baby may have been infected while still in the womb. The child continues to take antiretroviral drugs for about 15 months. Her mother then stopped giving the drug for some reason and treatment was resumed after the health workers.

Researchers have long known that it is important to care for HIV-positive mothers early on because they pass on antibodies to their babies. Newborns are at high risk if they are infected with HIV from a mother who has uncontrolled HIV or if the mother is found to be HIV positive just before birth.

"One hundred percent of (HIV positive) mothers will transmit these antibodies, but if there is no treatment, 30 percent of mothers will transmit the real virus", Luzuriaga said.

The investigators say the only documented case of HIV treatment is Timothy Brown, who is known as the "Berlin patient." In 2007, Brown, an American living in Germany, was battling leukemia and HIV when he underwent a bone marrow transplant. The transplant not only cured her cancer but also her HIV.

In an interview, Brown told Dr. Sanjay Gupta, that even though it has been many years, he is still free from HIV. "I've been tested everywhere", said Brown, who moved to San Francisco.

"My blood has been tested by many institutions. I've had two colonoscopies to be tested to see if they can find HIV in my colon, and they haven't been able to find it".

However, Brown's case is rare. The procedure, which is extremely dangerous, will not work in most patients because the bone marrow he receives has a special genetic mutation that makes the stem cells in it naturally immune to the virus.

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