DOCTORS IN THE US CURE BABY BORN WITH HIV!

Wow! This is definitely a major break through in medicine. A Mississippi baby born with HIV more than two years ago appears to have been cured of the virus. The unidentified child was diagnosed with HIV at birth to a mother who did not receive prenatal care or HIV treatment. Hence 30 hours after birth, the baby was started on antiretroviral treatment.

Doctors took the unusual step of prescribing three aggressive drugs (AZT, 3TC, nevirapine) at once after birth for the baby whose initial HIV viral load tests were high.

After being on treatment for like 15 months, doctors lost contact with the mother and the baby stopped receiving any medication. Only to reappear at 23 months of age with viral loads undetectable. Despite being off treatment for almost a year.

The results surprised Dr. Hannah Gay, a pediatric HIV specialist at the University of Mississippi, who was treating the child.

"My first thought was to panic. I thought, 'Oh my goodness, I have been treating a child who is not actually infected,'" she said.

But a battery of "highly sensitive" tests confirmed the absence of HIV in the baby. It is believed that giving the baby the three aggressive drugs so early after birth saved him.

His mother's HIV is being controlled with medication and she is "quite excited for her child".

The only other documented case of an HIV cure to date remains that of Timothy Brown.

Brown's story -- arguably one of the most followed in the realm of HIV research -- began in 1995 when he was diagnosed with HIV while attending school in Berlin. For the next 11 years, doctors treated him with anti-retroviral therapy, to which he responded positively.

His oncologist, Dr. Gero Hutter of the Charite Hospital in Berlin, opted to give Brown a stem-cell transplant to treat his leukemia. But rather than choosing a matched donor, he used the stem cells of a donor he found who had what is known as a CCR5 mutation, a mutation that makes cells immune to HIV.

After the transplant, Brown was able to stop HIV treatment without experiencing a return of his HIV disease.