Baby Born With HIV is Deemed Cured

Andrew Pollack and Donald G. McNeil Jr.
March 3, 2013
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/04/health/for-first-time-baby-cured-of-hiv-doctors-say.html?ref=aids&_r=0

Summary:
It was announced on Sunday, that a baby was cured of an HIV infection for the first time in medical history. This could change how babies are treated, and it could significantly reduce the number of babies that live with AIDS. The baby was intensively treated with antiretroviral drugs (because HIV is a retrovirus) starting at around 30 hours after birth, which isn't usually done. Researchers plan to test the results of this on other babies with AIDS in hopes of success, which will cause such methods to be used globally. A few years ago, scientists thought that this virus could not be cured, but now there is hope. Some experts say that the findings in the baby would probably not be relevant to adults. Some people say, though, that they needed to be convinced that the baby was actually infected. If it was not actually infection, then the case would be a case of prevention. This was already done for babies born to HIV infected mothers. That is the only uncertainty to the report. There is still speculation about whether or not the baby was actually infected. There are a handful of doctors that do confirm that the baby was infected. There were various tests done on the baby in its first month of life- four being for RNA and one for DNA. Once the treatment started, the virus levels in the baby declined as would be expected of infected patients. The baby did not start off with a lot of viral copies, and virus levels rapidly declined with treatment and were undetectable by the time the baby was 1 month old. The baby stopped being given drugs at 18 months, and when the child came back 5 months later, the results came back negative. It seemed to have worked!

Connection:
In the Prokaryotes Unit, we learned about HIV as a retrovirus. We learned that it was an RNA virus, which is why there were more RNA tests on the baby than DNA tests. HIV has a membranous envelope that helps the virus recognize the host cells and merge with the host cell membranes, delivering the contents of the virus to the host cell. The antiretroviral drugs had managed to stop the dangerous effects of HIV in the baby before the conditions were too harsh. We learned that HIV was a retrovirus, which meant that it reversed the usual DNA to RNA flow of genetic information in the process of transcription. Retroviruses carry molecules of an enzyme called reverse transcriptase, which catalyzes reverse transcription, which is the synthesis of double stranded DNA using a single stranded RNA template.