Infant born HIV Positive possibly cured!

Specter313

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Baby Born With HIV Apparently Cured, Say Scientists

WASHINGTON -- A baby born with the virus that causes AIDS appears to have been cured, scientists announced Sunday, describing the case of a child from Mississippi who's now 2 1/2 and has been off medication for about a year with no signs of infection.

There's no guarantee the child will remain healthy, although sophisticated testing uncovered just traces of the virus' genetic material still lingering. If so, it would mark only the world's second reported cure.

Specialists say Sunday's announcement, at a major AIDS meeting in Atlanta, offers promising clues for efforts to eliminate HIV infection in children, especially in AIDS-plagued African countries where too many babies are born with the virus.

"You could call this about as close to a cure, if not a cure, that we've seen," Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health, who is familiar with the findings, told The Associated Press.

A doctor gave this baby faster and stronger treatment than is usual, starting a three-drug infusion within 30 hours of birth. That was before tests confirmed the infant was infected and not just at risk from a mother whose HIV wasn't diagnosed until she was in labor.

"I just felt like this baby was at higher-than-normal risk, and deserved our best shot," Dr. Hannah Gay, a pediatric HIV specialist at the University of Mississippi, said in an interview.

That fast action apparently knocked out HIV in the baby's blood before it could form hideouts in the body. Those so-called reservoirs of dormant cells usually rapidly reinfect anyone who stops medication, said Dr. Deborah Persaud of Johns Hopkins Children's Center. She led the investigation that deemed the child "functionally cured," meaning in long-term remission even if all traces of the virus haven't been completely eradicated.

Next, Persaud's team is planning a study to try to prove that, with more aggressive treatment of other high-risk babies. "Maybe we'll be able to block this reservoir seeding," Persaud said.

No one should stop anti-AIDS drugs as a result of this case, Fauci cautioned.

But "it opens up a lot of doors" to research if other children can be helped, he said. "It makes perfect sense what happened."

Better than treatment is to prevent babies from being born with HIV in the first place.

About 300,000 children were born with HIV in 2011, mostly in poor countries where only about 60 percent of infected pregnant women get treatment that can keep them from passing the virus to their babies. In the U.S., such births are very rare because HIV testing and treatment long have been part of prenatal care.

"We can't promise to cure babies who are infected. We can promise to prevent the vast majority of transmissions if the moms are tested during every pregnancy," Gay stressed.

The only other person considered cured of the AIDS virus underwent a very different and risky kind of treatment – a bone marrow transplant from a special donor, one of the rare people who is naturally resistant to HIV. Timothy Ray Brown of San Francisco has not needed HIV medications in the five years since that transplant.

The Mississippi case shows "there may be different cures for different populations of HIV-infected people," said Dr. Rowena Johnston of amFAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research. That group funded Persaud's team to explore possible cases of pediatric cures.

It also suggests that scientists should look back at other children who've been treated since shortly after birth, including some reports of possible cures in the late 1990s that were dismissed at the time, said Dr. Steven Deeks of the University of California, San Francisco, who also has seen the findings.

"This will likely inspire the field, make people more optimistic that this is possible," he said.

In the Mississippi case, the mother had had no prenatal care when she came to a rural emergency room in advanced labor. A rapid test detected HIV. In such cases, doctors typically give the newborn low-dose medication in hopes of preventing HIV from taking root. But the small hospital didn't have the proper liquid kind, and sent the infant to Gay's medical center. She gave the baby higher treatment-level doses.

The child responded well through age 18 months, when the family temporarily quit returning and stopped treatment, researchers said. When they returned several months later, remarkably, Gay's standard tests detected no virus in the child's blood.

Ten months after treatment stopped, a battery of super-sensitive tests at half a dozen laboratories found no sign of the virus' return. There were only some remnants of genetic material that don't appear able to replicate, Persaud said.

In Mississippi, Gay gives the child a check-up every few months: "I just check for the virus and keep praying that it stays gone."

The mother's HIV is being controlled with medication and she is "quite excited for her child," Gay added.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/...d=maing-grid7|main5|dl1|sec1_lnk2&pLid=278007
 
I knew a guy who got HIV from living a wild life...then he stated to pray and he said God cured him of the HIV. And when I was a Christian, he told the story at the Church I used to go to. However...I have no idea if he was telling the truth or not anymore. I don't even recall his name and it's been years since I saw him.
 
I can see how this happened, considering there are cases where the child inside the womb is treated and is born negative, even though the mother is HIV positive.
 
I knew a guy who got HIV from living a wild life...then he stated to pray and he said God cured him of the HIV. And when I was a Christian, he told the story at the Church I used to go to. However...I have no idea if he was telling the truth or not anymore. I don't even recall his name and it's been years since I saw him.

He dead.
 
I knew a guy who got HIV from living a wild life...then he stated to pray and he said God cured him of the HIV. And when I was a Christian, he told the story at the Church I used to go to. However...I have no idea if he was telling the truth or not anymore. I don't even recall his name and it's been years since I saw him.
True story, and I'm sure I'll get some sarcastic responses to this. My dad's cousin, Monica, contracted HIV when she was a teenager. She was a wild one back then, but had since straightened her life out and even got married. She didn't find out until much later when AIDS started developing. She was on her death bed at one point, with no hope, because I mean, it was AIDS. There was no cure for that.

One day, she woke up, was completely cured of AIDS. This may sound stupid to certain people here, but I do believe it was because of God and prayer. We never stopped believing and praying she would make it. She still had to take HIV meds for quite a long time. And now she doesn't. It was a miracle to our family.
 
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True story, and I'm sure I'll get some sarcastic responses to this. My dad's cousin, Monica, contracted HIV when she was a teenager. She was a wild one back then, but had since straightened her life out and even got married. She didn't find out until much later when AIDS started developing. She was on her death bed at one point, with no hope, because I mean, it was AIDS. There was no cure for that.

One day, she woke up, was completely cured of AIDS. This may sound stupid to certain people here, but I do believe it was because of God and prayer. We never stopped believing and praying she would make it. She still had to take HIV meds for quite a long time. And now she doesn't. It was a miracle to our family.

This isn't to say I'm calling you a liar, just that the study of prayer might interest you.
In the study, the researchers monitored 1,802 patients at six hospitals who received coronary bypass surgery, in which doctors reroute circulation around a clogged vein or artery.

The patients were broken into three groups. Two were prayed for; the third was not. Half the patients who received the prayers were told that they were being prayed for; half were told that they might or might not receive prayers.

The researchers asked the members of three congregations — St. Paul's Monastery in St. Paul; the Community of Teresian Carmelites in Worcester, Mass.; and Silent Unity, a Missouri prayer ministry near Kansas City — to deliver the prayers, using the patients' first names and the first initials of their last names.

The congregations were told that they could pray in their own ways, but they were instructed to include the phrase, "for a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications."

Analyzing complications in the 30 days after the operations, the researchers found no differences between those patients who were prayed for and those who were not.

In another of the study's findings, a significantly higher number of the patients who knew that they were being prayed for — 59 percent — suffered complications, compared with 51 percent of those who were uncertain. The authors left open the possibility that this was a chance finding. But they said that being aware of the strangers' prayers also may have caused some of the patients a kind of performance anxiety.

"It may have made them uncertain, wondering am I so sick they had to call in their prayer team?" Dr. Bethea said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/31/health/31pray.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Interesting article about praying.
 
Don't worry, I don't take offense lol.

I mean, regardless of what anyone believes as far as spirituality and religion, it's something that happened in my life and happened to my family. And I would be interested to hear what non believers think as far as my dad's cousin goes and theories on the cause of her cure.
 
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Don't worry, I don't take offense lol.

I mean, regardless of what anyone believes as far as spirituality and religion, it's something that happened in my life and happened to my family. And I would be interested to hear what non believers think as far as my dad's cousin goes and what they think could be the cause of her cure.

That would require a lot of examination and information. What were the doctor's explanation?
 
Well, if its an actual preventitive for babies that is a huge leap forward as it may be able to be launched into a full blown cure. Still amazing news if it pans out. Hope so for the kids sake.
 
That would require a lot of examination and information. What were the doctor's explanation?
I think at the time, they literally did not have a clue because she was absolutely dying. This was back in the mid-late 90's. I was around 10. I assume she did discuss this with her doctor afterward but I can't remember any specific information that my family was privy to. I just know that she did have HIV at that point and was put back on medication for that.
 
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I think at the time, they literally did not have a clue because she was absolutely dying. This was back in the mid-late 90's. I was around 10. I assume she did discuss this with her doctor afterward but I can't remember any specific information that my family was privy to. I just know that she did have HIV at that point and was put back on medication for that.
Well, then, she wasn't really cured of anything. AIDS is a syndrome, and really amounts to a symptom of HIV infection. Symptoms may come and go with any given disease. Without knowing how her symptoms (in this case, immunodeficiency) were being treated, and in the absence of many, many other details, it's impossible to provide any explanation.

All too often when people are at a loss for an explanation, they immediately jump to, "God did it," and I tend to take issue with this dichotomy on philosophical grounds. It is neither useful nor tenable (on logical grounds) as a definitive conclusion, but that doesn't make it stupid.
 
"Cured" was probably the wrong word to use. Full blown AIDS is as far as I know, rare to come back from. It's more or less a death sentence.

I should say again though, my cousin no longer has HIV.

However, I do see the point about when you don't know specifics of medication and treatments, there's no way of knowing. I thought maybe someone on here would have more medical knowledge than I do (which is close to zero LOL), and could possibly theorize.
 
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However, I do see the point about when you don't know specifics of medication and treatments, there's no way of knowing. I thought maybe someone on here would have more medical knowledge than I do (which is close to zero LOL), and could possibly theorize.
Well, what little I do know is that HIV evokes a massive response from the immune system, all the while infecting T-cells just as fast as your body can shoot them out. So it initially results in a massive elevated immune response.

The problem is that the cells that give rise to these specialized immune cells can only divide so many times before they essentially give out. That's when the collapse of the immune system occurs, and that's usually when you develop AIDS, and become open to attack from outside illnesses/diseases.

So a plausible scenario that I can envision is that she hadn't quite reached the stage where her immune system was completely exhausted, but still experienced a crash of her immune system that would have looked like "full blown AIDS." It is possible that this crash happened for some other reason, and wasn't the massive (and final) failure typically associated with AIDS, and that it was merely a temporary crash of her immune system from which she could recover.

But I'm not a doctor, I'm just a biologist. So I really don't know. But that seems pretty plausible to me.
 
I've read stories where people actually talked themselves out of being sick, and other stories where hypochondriacs talked themselves into being deathly sick. The mind is a powerful tool.
 
Good for the kid to have a chance to live a healthy life!
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Thought I'd put this here since it seems to kinda go hand in hand:

A new study has shown that bee venom can kill the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).

Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have demonstrated that a toxin called melittin found in bee venom can destroy HIV by poking holes in the envelope surrounding the virus, according to a news release sent out by Washington University.

Nanoparticles smaller than HIV were infused with the bee venom toxin, explains U.S. News & World Report. A "protective bumper" was added to the nanoparticle's surface, allowing it to bounce off normal cells and leave them intact. Normal cells are larger than HIV, so the nanoparticles target HIV, which is so small it fits between the bumpers.

“Melittin on the nanoparticles fuses with the viral envelope,” said research instructor Joshua L. Hood, MD, PhD, via the news release. “The melittin forms little pore-like attack complexes and ruptures the envelope, stripping it off the virus.” Adding, “We are attacking an inherent physical property of HIV. Theoretically, there isn’t any way for the virus to adapt to that. The virus has to have a protective coat, a double-layered membrane that covers the virus.”

This revelation can lead to the development of a vaginal gel to prevent the spread of HIV and, it seems, an intravenous treatment to help those already infected. “Our hope is that in places where HIV is running rampant, people could use this gel as a preventive measure to stop the initial infection,” said Hood.

The bee venom HIV study was published on Thursday in the journal Antiviral Therapy, according to U.S. News & World Report.

This study comes on the heels of news that a Mississippi baby with HIV has apparently been cured. The mother was diagnosed with HIV during labor and the baby received a three-drug treatment just 30 hours after birth, before tests confirmed the infant was infected. The child, now 2 years old, has been off medication for about a year and shows no sign of infection.

More than 34 million people are living with HIV/AIDS worldwide, according to amFAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research. Of these, 3.3 million are under the age of 15 years old. Each day, almost 7,000 people contract HIV around the globe.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/09/bee-venom-kills-hiv-cells_n_2843743.html?ncid=webmail22
 
The last time I spoke with him...I only recall the church and him had a falling out and he was back in the hospital...so yea, maybe he is dead. That was like 3 years ago.

That was god trying to kill him.
 

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