and AIDS are cured now? babies born with, are now free?
Not yet.. They have yet to find a true cure for HIV and AIDS.
What they recently managed to do is "functionally cure" a newborn that was born to an HIV+ positive mother.
The gist of it was that they provided this HIV+ newborn with antivirals within 30 hours of being born. This early treatment, has allowed for the child to be functionally cured, which simply means that she won't require lifelong treatment and the trace of the virus in her is so low that standard clinical tests are unable to detect the virus.
Their theory suggests that even though the child was HIV+ (verified a few days after birth), that the viral load (actual virus particles per milliliter) was actually very low in the child's body. Not only was the viral load low, it was also early enough so that the virus had not developed too much of a reservoir (i.e. found enough hiding places) within the child's system. So, drowning the kid in antivirals (3 of them) for over 15 months, just allowed for the virus to not replicate long enough that it became undetectable.
Whether or not the child will ever test positive again is unknown. For now, she is "functionally cured", because they aren't able to detect it. It shows promise, because after what seems to be close to 2 years, there is still no trace of the virus, but they
CAN NOT guarantee it won't ever show up in blood tests.
The only case where they actually
CURED a person was documented in Germany. Unfortunately, they have yet to accomplish the same results with any other human being.
That individual's case (The Berlin Patient) was special in that he had Leukemia, had his immune system wiped out with both chemo and radiation and then they implanted stem cells from a patient, that had the rare gene that does not allow for HIV transmission, into the HIV patient. The body of the HIV+ patient then managed to replicate the same cells, which allowed his body to essentially reject the virus. It was a very rare situation.
If you want to know more about that, you can read up on it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gero_H%C3%BCtter"
1"
