A girl born in South Africa is diagnosed with HIV at birth. After only 10 months of antiretroviral treatment, the presence of HIV in his body has become undetectable. A treatment deliberately stopped as part of a clinical study. Aged 9 and a half today, she lives in good health without taking medication.
According to the International AIDS Research Conference in Paris, which reports the study, this is the third case of remission in the world observed in a child.
Remission does not mean cure
This extremely rare case, called “functional remission”, strengthens the hopes of researchers in the fight against AIDS. This does not mean a cure, HIV is still present, but it cannot multiply or be transmitted to another person, even in the absence of daily treatment, because it is too weak.
“This new case reinforces our hopes that one day we can spare HIV-positive children the burden of lifelong treatment, by treating them for a short time from an early age,” said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious. Diseases (NIAID), one of the authors of the study published in the National Institutes of Health.
In March 2013, the first case of an HIV-positive child cured of AIDS after receiving treatment within hours of birth had been announced in the United States and was going around the world. The little girl, born to an untreated HIV-positive mother, had been treated for 18 months with triple antiretroviral therapy before being considered, 10 months later, in functional remission. Unfortunately, the virus reappeared two years after stopping treatment.
Completely eradicating the virus from a patient’s body is impossible today, hence the interest for researchers to work on avenues of remission without treatment for life.
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