Cure of HIV in a baby girl in Mississippi gives hope, but more studies needed:

The finding presented yesterday (Sunday, February 3,2013) at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, in Atlanta has been today's headline in many newspapers. Some news media even reported by going a step further saying HIV is curable.

But the fact is, this isolated case doesn't guarantee any cure to people already infected with HIV nor it confirms HIV is curable in babies.

What the researchers presented yesterday was the case of a "functional cure" in a baby girl born with HIV two- and- a-half years ago. The baby's mother was found to be HIV positive only at the time of delivery .

Normally, mothers infected with HIV take antiretroviral drugs that can almost eliminate the odds of the virus being transferred to the baby. It didn't happen in this case since the mother didn't know her HIV status. She was brought to a rural hospital in the fall of 2010 already in labor and gave birth prematurely. She had not seen a doctor during pregnancy and didn't know she had HIV. When a test showed the mother might be infected, the hospital transferred the baby to the University of Mississippi Medical center.

Doctors in University of Mississippi immediately tested baby's blood for HIV and started a three-drug regimen as if to treat the baby ,aggressively, as soon as possible, even before the confirmatory tests could be available.

Usually it takes 4-6 weeks to get the results of confirmatory test and babies born to HIV positive mothers are routinely given a single prophylactic medication (called Zidovudine) within 6-12 hours. But standard 3-drug regimen will be started only when confirmatory tests are available, which often takes several weeks.

In this case doctors found that virus levels rapidly declined with treatment and were undetectable by the time the baby was a month old. Test results were negative for HIV until the baby was 18 months old, after which the mother stopped coming to the hospital and stopped giving the drugs.

When the mother and child returned five months later, doctors expected to see high viral loads in the baby. But the tests were again negative. Suspecting a laboratory error, they ordered more tests. But all tests returned negative.

In 1995 New England Journal of Medicine also reported some cases of babies clearing HIV virus even without treatment. But it was rejected by medical community since the tests were not much advanced as we have now.

There are different hypotheses about this functional cure as some scientists say virus disappeared since it couldn't establish a reservoir in the baby due to the early treatment., some say it could be due to some genetic mutation triggered by baby's immune system.

So far, no reliable study has been done to find out how or why this happens. But this finding reported yesterday will open doors for more research and gives hope that other babies may also be saved by early testing and aggressive treatment.

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