Baby Born With HIV Apparently Cured, Say Scientists

[theHawk]

Fudge packers according to the Bible are going to hell.......

Leviticus 18:22 "Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is an abomination"

That takes care of a large portion of Middle Eastern Muslim men.....

 

[J.E.D]

Fudge packers are not AIDS "victims".

Fuck you, Sunni Fag.

Besides the fact that heteros can contract AIDS, you're a sorry sack of shit.

 

[J.E.D]

Interesting how this thread gets moved to where it belongs, but novasteve's homophobe thread about AIDS stays in the politics forum where you can't make off-topic posts or insult people.

 

[J.E.D]

Fudge packers according to the Bible are going to hell.......

Leviticus 18:22 "Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is an abomination"

Have fun in Hell, Sunni Fag

 

[hortysir]

Interesting how this thread gets moved to where it belongs, but novasteve's homophobe thread about AIDS stays in the politics forum where you can't make off-topic posts or insult people.

I posted it in Health and Lifestyle

 

[rdean]

I thought AIDS was part of "God's Plan"? Don't many right wing religious leaders say that?

 

[hortysir]

I thought AIDS was part of "God's Plan"? Don't many right wing religious leaders say that?

Define "many".

 

[waltky]

Story of baby cured of HIV leaves questions for adult cases...

Analysis: A cure for HIV?
4 March 2013 - A baby girl has been "functionally cured" of HIV in the US. The difference it will make to her life could be huge - avoiding a lifetime of medication, social stigma and worries about whether to tell friends and family.

But beyond the personal story, there is a huge question - does this bring us any closer to an HIV cure? There are very special circumstances involved in the US case. Doctors were able to hit the virus hard and early. This is not possible in adults, who will acquire HIV months if not years before they find out. Even in the UK, where at-risk groups are offered free regular testing - one in four people with HIV is unaware they have the virus. By the time they find out, it will be fully established - hiding away in reservoirs in the immune system that no therapy around can touch. It is also unclear how a newborn's immune system, babies still get much of their protection from their mother through breast milk, may affect treatment. One thing is certain - this approach is not going to provide a cure for the vast majority of people with HIV. So what about about somebody who has been living with HIV for a decade? Any hope of a cure for them?

The first thing to note is that HIV is not the killer it used to be. It first emerged in Africa in the early 20th Century and became a global health problem by the 1980s. In the early days, there was no treatment, never mind talk of a cure. The virus claimed the lives of more than 25 million people in the past three decades, according to the World Health Organization. Then, good antiretroviral therapies emerged in the mid-1990s and the impact it had on the number of deaths was dramatic. People infected with HIV should have a near normal lifespan if they have access to treatment. Of course this is a big "if". Nearly 70% of people living with HIV are in sub-Saharan Africa, where access to drugs is relatively poor.

'Weak spot'

The hunt is on for a cure. "We had always assumed that it was impossible, but we've started to discover things we didn't know before and it's opening up a chink in the armour," Dr John Frater, from the University of Oxford, told the BBC. "A cure is something we can no longer write off as impossible." After HIV first infects the patient, the virus spreads rapidly, infecting cells all over the body. Then, the virus hides inside DNA where it is untouchable. But there are now experimental cancer drugs that might be able to flush the virus out and make it vulnerable. Dr Frater said: "It turns on a virus inside a cell and it becomes visible to the immune system and we can target it with a vaccine."

However, this approach requires drugs to make the virus active and a vaccine to train the immune system to finish it off - this is not just round the corner. "We are a long, long way away, in truth," said Dr Frater. There is another route being considered - involving a rare mutation that leaves people resistant to HIV infection. In 2007, Timothy Ray Brown became the first patient believed to have recovered from HIV. His immune system was destroyed as part of leukaemia treatment. It was then restored with a stem-cell transplant from a patient with the mutation. A little bit of genetic engineering may also help to modify a patient's own immune system so that it has the protective mutation. Once again this is a distant prospect.

'Uncertain'

 

[waltky]

Dr. Gay??...

U.S. doctor's "gutsy" move led to baby's cure from HIV
6 Mar.`13 - The doctor who cured an HIV infected baby for the first time is happier talking to children than to adults and is finding all the attention since the news came out a little overwhelming.

Dr. Hannah Gay and colleagues Dr. Katherine Luzuriaga of the University of Massachusetts and Dr. Deborah Persaud of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore reported on the child's case at a medical meeting in Atlanta on Sunday. "The breakthrough has been exciting and I'm very hopeful that that's going to lead to future research that will give us some answers," said Gay, a Mississippi pediatrician and soft-spoken mother of four adult children.

But the attention is difficult for a woman "much more comfortable talking to children than adults," said her husband, Paul Gay. "She didn't anticipate this kind of explosion of attention." Dr. Gay, a 59-year-old native of Jackson, Mississippi, likes to spend time designing needle points, singing in her church choir and reading theology or medical literature when she's not working 12-hour days treating patients, in a state with the nation's highest poverty rate. "She is the most unlikely person in the world to be getting this kind of international attention, really," said Jay Richardson, her former pastor at the Highland Colony Baptist Church. "You don't ever hear her talking about herself or trying to promote herself in any way. She's a quiet, humble person. Extremely intelligent. Very committed to her faith. Very involved in her church. Very committed to teaching children the bible."

Except for six years working in Ethiopia as a missionary, Dr. Gay has spent the bulk of her academic and professional career at the University of Mississippi, where she received her undergraduate and medical degrees and met her husband of 37 years. She has worked the better part of her career at the university's medical center serving the state's youngest victims of HIV. During that time, Dr. Gay has published several articles about ways to keep mothers from passing HIV infection to their babies and participated in the federally sponsored Pediatric AIDS Clinical Trials Group, which studied the use of the aggressive treatment of children who are at high risk of infection.

More U.S. doctor's "gutsy" move led to baby's cure from HIV - Yahoo! News

 

[waltky]

14 HIV Patients 'Functionally Cured'...

14 HIV Patients Have 'Functional Cure'
March 15, 2013 - Early and effective HIV treatment may, in a small fraction of patients, lead to a so-called functional cure, French researchers found.

Fourteen patients who were treated within the first two months of infection were later able to stop combination antiretroviral therapy without an HIV rebound, according to Asier Sáez-Cirión of the Institut Pasteur in Paris. While all 14 still have HIV, in most cases it can only be detected with ultrasensitive laboratory tests and is undetectable by standard methods, Sáez-Cirión and colleagues reported in the journal PLoS Pathogens. But in all cases, the infection appears to be under control without the use of drugs – the definition of a functional cure, which unlike a "sterilizing" cure does not completely get rid of HIV. The report is the second in several days of what appears to be curative early treatment for HIV. Researchers reported at the recent Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections that combination antiretroviral treatment in the first few hours of life appears to have eliminated HIV infection in a baby.

Nonetheless, in general, stopping HIV treatment is not recommended, said Dr. Michael Saag of the University of Alabama Birmingham. "In my practice," he told MedPage Today, "I would start everyone with acute infection on antiretroviral therapy, but in general I would just continue that therapy and not stop." Several studies of so-called treatment interruption have showed that for most people, stopping therapy leads to sharp and dangerous increases in HIV replication, Saag noted. The difference in this group, the researchers suggested, is that they were treated very early, in what's called primary or acute infection, and spent between a year and 7.6 years on therapy, with a median of 36.5 months.

This image shows Dr. Deborah Persaud of Johns Hopkins' Children's Center in Baltimore.[/img]
A baby born with HIV appears to have been cured, scientists announced Sunday, March 3, 2013.

Their reasons for stopping, Sáez-Cirión told MedPage Today in an email, included a desire to take a vacation from therapy and participation in a treatment-interruption study. The 10 men and four women have now been off therapy for between four and 10 years. Their plasma viral loads are below 40 copies of HIV RNA per milliliter in all but three cases, and below five copies in five patients. The virus is conventionally regarded as "undetectable" if the plasma viral load is below 50 copies per milliliter, although so-called single-copy assays – only rarely used outside the lab – can detect smaller amounts of HIV.

What Sáez-Cirión and colleagues are calling "post-treatment controllers" are not common, they noted. When they looked at the French database of HIV patients from 1997 to 2011, they found just 756 patients who were treated within 6 months of infection and who maintained therapy for at least a year. Of those who had a detectable viral load before therapy and an undetectable one afterward, just 70 stopped treatment and had subsequent viral load measurements. Kaplan-Meier estimates of that population suggested the probability of maintaining viral control after a year was 15.3 percent. That means, Saag noted, that about 85 percent of patients treated early will still face viral rebound if they stop treatment.

More 14 HIV Patients Have 'Functional Cure' - ABC News

 

[waltky]

Progress against HIV if treated early...

Early HIV drugs 'functionally cure about one in 10'
15 March 2013 - Rapid treatment after HIV infection may be enough to "functionally cure" about a 10th of those diagnosed early, say researchers in France.

They have been analysing 14 people who stopped therapy, but have since shown no signs of the virus resurging. It follows reports of a baby girl being effectively cured after very early treatment in the US. However, most people infected with HIV do not find out until the virus has fully infiltrated the body. The group of patients, known as the Visconti cohort, all started treatment within 10 weeks of being infected. The patients were caught early as they turned up in hospital with other conditions and HIV was found in their blood. They stuck to a course of antiretroviral drugs for three years, on average, but then stopped. The drugs keep the virus only in check, they cannot eradicate it from its hiding places inside the immune system. Normally, when the drugs stop, the virus bounces back.

Control

This has not happened in the Visconti patients. Some have been able to control HIV levels for a decade. Dr Asier Saez-Cirion, from the Institute Pasteur in Paris, said: "Most individuals who follow the same treatment will not control the infection, but there are a few of them who will." He said 5-15% of patients may be functionally cured, meaning they no longer needed drugs, by attacking the virus soon after infection. "They still have HIV, it is not eradication of HIV, it is a kind of remission of the infection." Their latest study, in the journal PLoS Pathogens, analysed what happened to the immune system of the patients. Early treatment may limit the number of unassailable HIV hideouts that are formed. However, the researchers said it was "unclear" why only some patients were functionally cured.

HIV, in green, bursting out of a white blood cell it has hijacked

Dr Andrew Freedman, a reader in infectious diseases at Cardiff University School of Medicine, said the findings were "certainly interesting". "The presumption is that they've started treatment very early and the virus hasn't spread to so many of the long-term reservoirs and that's why it works. "Whether they'll control it forever, or whether it'll be for a number of years and subsequently they will progress and the virus will reappear, we don't know." However, he cautioned that many patients would be diagnosed much later than in this study.

Deborah Jack, the chief executive of the National AIDS Trust said it was "exciting times" in progress towards an HIV cure, but the key was early treatment. "This just underlines the importance of people being testing and diagnosed early. Currently half of people living with HIV in the UK are diagnosed late - indicating that they are likely to have been infected for five years."

BBC News - Early HIV drugs 'functionally cure about one in 10'

 

[waltky]

Progress report on Mississippi baby born with HIV...

US baby born with HIV may be cured
Fri, Oct 25, 2013 - DOUBT: Peter Havens, a US government adviser on HIV treatment guidelines, said the child may have an undiscovered genetic trait that helped her manage the virus

Doctors now have convincing evidence that they put HIV into remission, hopefully for good, in a Mississippi baby born with the AIDS virus — a medical first that is prompting a new look at how hard and fast such cases should be treated. The case was reported earlier this year, but some doctors were skeptical that the baby was really infected rather than testing positive because of exposure to the virus in the mom’s blood. The new report, published online on Wednesday by the New England Journal of Medicine, makes clear that the girl, now three, was infected in the womb. She was treated unusually aggressively and shows no active infection, despite stopping AIDS medicines 18 months ago.

Doctors will not call it a cure because they do not know what proof or how much time is needed to declare someone free of HIV infection, long feared to be permanent. “We want to be very cautious here. We’re calling it remission because we’d like to observe the child for a longer time and be absolutely sure there’s no rebound,” said Katherine Luzuriaga, a University of Massachusetts AIDS expert involved in the baby’s care. The government’s top AIDS scientist, Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, agreed. “At minimum, the baby is in a clear remission. It is possible that the baby has actually been cured. We don’t have a definition for cure as we do for certain cancers, where after five years or so you can be relatively certain the person is not going to go and relapse,” Fauci said. A scientist at his institute did sophisticated tests that showed no active virus in the child.

A government-sponsored international study starting in January aims to test early treatment in babies born with HIV to see if the results in this case can be reproduced. Most HIV-infected moms in the US get AIDS medicines during pregnancy, which greatly cuts the chances they will pass the virus to their babies, but the Mississippi mom got no prenatal care and her HIV was discovered during labor. Doctors considered the baby to be at such high risk that they started the child on three powerful medicines 30 hours after birth, rather than waiting for a test to confirm infection as is usually done.

Within a month, the baby’s virus fell to undetectable levels. She remained on treatment until she was 18 months old, when doctors lost contact with her. Ten months later when she returned, they could find no sign of infection even though the mom had stopped giving the child AIDS medicines. Only one other person is thought to have been cured of HIV infection — a San Francisco man who had a bone marrow transplant in 2007 from a donor with natural resistance to HIV, and showed no sign of infection five years later.

In the Mississippi baby, “there’s no immune mechanism we can identify that would keep the virus in check” like that bone marrow donor, said another study author, Deborah Persaud of the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, who helped investigate the case because she has researched treatment in children. Peter Havens, pediatric HIV chief at Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin and a government adviser on HIV treatment guidelines, said the child may have an undiscovered genetic trait that helped her manage the virus. “I’m just not convinced that her dramatic response would be replicable in a large population,” he said.

MORE

 

[hortysir]

Progress report on Mississippi baby born with HIV...

US baby born with HIV may be cured
Fri, Oct 25, 2013 - DOUBT: Peter Havens, a US government adviser on HIV treatment guidelines, said the child may have an undiscovered genetic trait that helped her manage the virus

Doctors now have convincing evidence that they put HIV into remission, hopefully for good, in a Mississippi baby born with the AIDS virus — a medical first that is prompting a new look at how hard and fast such cases should be treated. The case was reported earlier this year, but some doctors were skeptical that the baby was really infected rather than testing positive because of exposure to the virus in the mom’s blood. The new report, published online on Wednesday by the New England Journal of Medicine, makes clear that the girl, now three, was infected in the womb. She was treated unusually aggressively and shows no active infection, despite stopping AIDS medicines 18 months ago.

Doctors will not call it a cure because they do not know what proof or how much time is needed to declare someone free of HIV infection, long feared to be permanent. “We want to be very cautious here. We’re calling it remission because we’d like to observe the child for a longer time and be absolutely sure there’s no rebound,” said Katherine Luzuriaga, a University of Massachusetts AIDS expert involved in the baby’s care. The government’s top AIDS scientist, Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, agreed. “At minimum, the baby is in a clear remission. It is possible that the baby has actually been cured. We don’t have a definition for cure as we do for certain cancers, where after five years or so you can be relatively certain the person is not going to go and relapse,” Fauci said. A scientist at his institute did sophisticated tests that showed no active virus in the child.

A government-sponsored international study starting in January aims to test early treatment in babies born with HIV to see if the results in this case can be reproduced. Most HIV-infected moms in the US get AIDS medicines during pregnancy, which greatly cuts the chances they will pass the virus to their babies, but the Mississippi mom got no prenatal care and her HIV was discovered during labor. Doctors considered the baby to be at such high risk that they started the child on three powerful medicines 30 hours after birth, rather than waiting for a test to confirm infection as is usually done.

Within a month, the baby’s virus fell to undetectable levels. She remained on treatment until she was 18 months old, when doctors lost contact with her. Ten months later when she returned, they could find no sign of infection even though the mom had stopped giving the child AIDS medicines. Only one other person is thought to have been cured of HIV infection — a San Francisco man who had a bone marrow transplant in 2007 from a donor with natural resistance to HIV, and showed no sign of infection five years later.

In the Mississippi baby, “there’s no immune mechanism we can identify that would keep the virus in check” like that bone marrow donor, said another study author, Deborah Persaud of the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, who helped investigate the case because she has researched treatment in children. Peter Havens, pediatric HIV chief at Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin and a government adviser on HIV treatment guidelines, said the child may have an undiscovered genetic trait that helped her manage the virus. “I’m just not convinced that her dramatic response would be replicable in a large population,” he said.

MORE

Thanks for the update, Walt

 

[Politico]

There is no cure for HIV.

 

[ABikerSailor]

There is no cure for HIV.

Yanno..............you may wish to Google your premise that there is no cure for HIV.

It seems that there have been many great strides made on this problem, and it seems that they're getting positive results.

10 years ago, HIV was a death sentence, yet there are many people alive today who have the proper medicine who have dealt with it very well.

There are also many babies who were born with it who also seem to be feeling a cure.

Are you against HIV because you're a bigot? Or................are you some homophobic idiot who is trying to keep the bigotry alive because you're too stupid or ignorant to allow the possibility that it's true?

Me? I kinda like to keep up on science and technology, and am happy that they have almost got it cured.

But................keep up with the bigotry if it keeps you warm..................

 

[Politico]

I never said there weren't positive results.

 

[waltky]

ABSailor wrote: Yanno..............you may wish to Google your premise that there is no cure for HIV.

It seems that there have been many great strides made on this problem, and it seems that they're getting positive results.

10 years ago, HIV was a death sentence, yet there are many people alive today who have the proper medicine who have dealt with it very well.

While there has been some progress in the fight against AIDS...

... the only cure so far is abstinence...

... if you know of a cure, post an article on it.

 

[ABikerSailor]

ABSailor wrote: Yanno..............you may wish to Google your premise that there is no cure for HIV.

It seems that there have been many great strides made on this problem, and it seems that they're getting positive results.

10 years ago, HIV was a death sentence, yet there are many people alive today who have the proper medicine who have dealt with it very well.

While there has been some progress in the fight against AIDS...

... the only cure so far is abstinence...

... if you know of a cure, post an article on it.

Here ya go...........................

HIV Cure: New Treatment Discovered Effective Against Infected Cells and HIV via Intravenous Injection

According to the article, the virus sank to undetectable levels a few weeks after the antibodies were administered.

 

[Politico]

There still is no cure. But good for them.

 

[waltky]

From the article...

A positive result from the research study suggests a possible new and effective treatment against HIV that could only target infected cells and the virus itself. However, the new treatment discovery requires tests on humans before any commercialisation will be made.

It's only in the animal research study phase...

... hasn't made it to the human trial stage yet...

... so, still no cure but it does look promising.