Second Baby in U.S. HIV-Free after Early Treatment

A baby that was treated for HIV within a few hours of birth is now free of the virus nearly a  year later, according to health officials. The approach used to help the child mirrored that taken for a Mississippi baby who has been taken off a 21-month treatment with no detectable signs of the virus at this time.

The nine-month-old baby girl, born at Miller Children's Hospital in Long Beach, Calif., was known to have the disease and has responded well to early administration of antiretroviral drugs.  It was during a medical conference in Boston that Deborah Persuad, M.D., a pediatrics specialist and virologist from Johns Hopkins University said that no trace of the lentivirus can now be detected in the infant's blood and tissues.

According to Audra Deveikis, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at the hospital, where the baby was born, she tested the infant and began giving her high, treatment-level doses of antiretroviral drugs before even knowing if she was HIV-positive, the AFP notes, via a phone conference with Yvonne Bryson, the chief of pediatric infectious diseases at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles.

"The way it works is you test and you treat before you know the results because it takes several days to get the results," explained Bryson, a consultant on the case.

HIV leads to the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), which causes severe damage to the infected individual's body. Yet researchers estimate that more than 34 million people around the world suffer from it.

"This is a call to action for us to mobilize and be able to learn from these cases," Persaud said to BBC News. "Really the only way we can prove that we have accomplished remission in these kids is by taking them off treatment and that's not without risk."

At this time, the California baby is still receiving three-drug anti-AIDS cocktails, consisting of AZT, 3TC and nevirapine.

However, as the medications can be difficult to work with, health officials note that the three-drug treatment is not typically given to children unless they are 100 percent positive that they are infected. And even then, it is not usually administered in the first few weeks.