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 The Mississippi child's stunning story, first disclosed at a
medical meeting in March 2013, was the first account of an
HIV-infected infant achieving what appeared to be a cure after
receiving aggressive drug treatment within the first 30 hours of
life.
The case raised hopes that more of the roughly 250,000 children who
are born each year infected with the human immunodeficiency virus,
which causes AIDS, might have a shot at a cure.
Those hopes were dashed when the child's doctors discovered last
week that the HIV virus had begun replicating, Dr Anthony Fauci,
director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infections
Diseases, said at a press conference on Thursday.
"Certainly, this is a disappointing turn of events for this young
child, the medical staff involved in the child's care and the
HIV/AIDS research community," Fauci said in a statement.
The girl, now 4, was born prematurely in a Mississippi clinic in
2010 to an HIV-infected mother who had received no prenatal care.
After her birth, the child was rushed to the University of
Mississippi Medical Center, where Dr Hannah Gay, a pediatric HIV
specialist, decided to take aggressive action, offering the newborn
a three-drug cocktail of powerful HIV medications. Normally,
children suspected of HIV infection are given a milder course of
treatments until tests can confirm the infection.
The child remained on treatment for 18 months, then stopped coming
in for treatment. When she returned to the medical center some weeks
later, the child showed no sign of the virus.
Since March, the child's progress has been monitored closely, and
until last week, she had gone 27 months without treatment. Tests
during that time showed no evidence of the virus.
That changed during a scheduled check-up last week, in which doctors
discovered the virus had begun to replicate. The girl is now being
treated with anti-HIV drugs, treatments she will likely need to take
for the rest of her life unless a cure can be found.
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Gay described her disappointment as "a punch to the gut."
The developments likely cast doubt about the prospects of a cure for
an HIV-infected California baby. In March, that child's doctors
announced they had used the same approach and have found no trace of
virus in the baby after nine months of treatment. Because that child
is still being treated, however, the case was not classified as a
cure.
Even so, Fauci said the Mississippi case remains important because
it confirms that the baby was indeed infected, something that had
been doubted, and that early and aggressive treatment helped prevent
the virus from replicating.
Fauci in May had announced plans to study more children using that
same technique, but he will be taking a "hard look" at the design of
that study now.
(Reporting Julie Steenhuysen in Chicago; Additional reporting by
Toni Clarke in Washington; Editing by Bill Trott and Leslie Adler)
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