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 babe born two-and-a-half years ago in Mississippi with HIV is the basic casing of a so-called "functional cure" of the infection, researchers announced Sunday. Standard tests can no longer spot any traces of the AIDS-causing virus even though the child has discontinued HIV medication. "We allow this is the first well-documented case of a functional cure," said look lead author Dr Deborah Persaud, associate professor of pediatrics in the class 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 lass was not part of a study but, instead, the beneficiary of an unexpected and partly unplanned cycle of events that - once confirmed and replicated in a strict study - might help more children who are born with HIV or who at risk of contracting HIV from their parent eradicate the virus from their body. Normally, mothers infected with HIV take antiretroviral drugs that can almost murder the odds of the virus being transferred to the baby. If a mother doesn't be familiar with 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 child starts HIV drug treatment. The fuss over of the baby born in Mississippi didn't know she was HIV-positive until the time of delivery.

But in this case, both the primary and confirmatory tests on the baby were able to be completed within one day, allowing the baby to be started on HIV medicine 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 young gentleman (doctors aren't disclosing the gender) would have bewitched the medications for the lay 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 toddler stayed on the regimen for only 18 months before dropping out of the medical combination and discontinuing the drugs.

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

No one is assuredly sure why this child achieved a "functional" remedy - meaning the virus is in remission even without medications. But investigators believe that giving antiviral remedying so early in life meant the virus had no time to create viral "reservoirs" where dormant HIV cells can pause for years before becoming active again. "For us this is a very exciting finding. By treating a spoil 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, stool of the HIV Medicine Association and director of HIV/AIDS at Kaiser Permanente, stressed that this was a "functional cure-all and not a cure in the most classic sense of the word. If we devour 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 exemplar of a "sterilizing cure" - when there are absolutely no traces of HIV in the body - has been documented. This occurred in the alleged "Berlin patient," who received a bone marrow transplant for leukemia. The transplanted cells came from a provider who had a rare genetic mutation that increases immunity against the most common cut of HIV. The Berlin patient has remained HIV-free after discontinuing drug therapy.

And Persaud said she is not advocating that the Mississippi cover become the standard of care. "This is a single case and we don't remarkably know what are all of the factors involved ". But the case does "pave the way now for us to without delay start clinical studies to see if we can replicate these findings in more infants". Those trials are perceptive 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 coddle were "encouraging" but "time will tell" if such a strategy can keep the virus under pilot for long periods of time without medication.

He emphasized that there are ways to prevent a baby from becoming infected in the start place. "This again shows the importance of testing pregnant mothers and getting them into care and on painkiller 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 tiptop treatment options" scriptovore.com. The research presented Sunday was funded by the US National Institutes of Health and the American Foundation for AIDS Research.