Super Power Alert! One In Ten African Children With HIV Have Monkey-Like Defense, Protects Them From AIDS

Do kids really have super powers? A study recently conducted in South Africa revealed that about one in 10 children infected with HIV have developed a monkey-like immune system that protects them from developing AIDS.

According to Popular Science, the study published in the journal Science Translational Medicine reported that although the levels of the virus in their blood is significantly high, the children's immune systems were "keeping calm" which was a major reason why the infection did not worsen. "This is quite unusual because in general, the progression from HIV infection to serious disease is more rapid in children than in adults. About 60 percent of kids infected die within two and a half years," said senior study author Philip Goulder, a pediatric infectious disease researcher at the University of Oxford.

In the study, researchers analyzed the blood of 170 children from South Africa who had HIV, had never had antiretroviral therapy and yet had not developed AIDS. Tests revealed that they had a huge amount of human immunodeficiency viruses (HIV) in every milliliter of their blood. This amount would normally cause their immune system to shut down, try to fight the infection, or make them seriously sick, but none of those happened, Science Alert reported.

Experts believe that the findings could point to new immune-based therapies intended for HIV infection. Normally, the virus eventually destroys the immune system, which in turn leaves the body vulnerable to a number of infections and what is known as acquired human immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS).

"Essentially, their immune system is ignoring the virus as far as possible. Goulder told BBC News. "Waging war against the virus is in most cases the wrong thing to do." In contrary, not fighting the virus seems to do great things to the immune system. HIV destroys white blood cells in the body, which are commonly known as the warriors of the immune system. when this happens and the body's defenses go into a frenzy, even more cells can get killed by chronic levels of inflammation.

Interestingly enough, this is also the strategy used by 40 species of monkeys, which are also able to survive an HIV infection by not allowing it to progress to AIDS. "Natural selection has worked in these cases," explained Goulder, "and the mechanism is very similar to the one in these kids that don't progress." And in humans, the strategy is pretty much unique to kids.

Meanwhile, the team is still investigating if the 'do-less' kid approach will work better for future treatments and whether or not the children involved in the study will continue to be protected against AIDS as they age. "It is not known whether it would be clinically safe for these newly identified HIV-infected pediatric non-progressors to remain off-therapy," infectious disease specialists Ann Chahroudi and Guido Silvestri from Emory University in the US, who weren't involved in the study, write in a commentary on the new research.

However, researchers admit that the study may have found "very earliest signs of coevolution of HIV in humans". "We may be identifying an entirely new pathway by studying kids that in the longer term could be translated to new treatments for all HIV-infected people," Goulder told BBC. Researchers also said that they still have a long way to go, but by better understanding these children, they may also finally be able to understand how to manage HIV using fewer drugs and having minimal side effects.