Doctors claim to have cured HIV-infected baby

According to The New York Times, a team of US doctors say they have healed an HIV-infected baby for the first time in history. This is a girl who received a new - and aggressive - treatment in 2010, just 30 hours after birth.

According to the publication, the birth was premature and the mother of the child did not know that she was infected with the human immunodeficiency virus. After proving that the girl was also HIV positive, the doctors applied three different drugs - instead of the conventional treatment involving two drugs - which, according to the team, caused a rapid drop in the virus count.

Today the child is two and a half years old and has not received any kind of medication for a year, and during this period doctors have not detected the activity of the active virus in the girl's body. This would be the second documented case of curing HIV worldwide. The first was from a 42-year-old American, Timothy Brown, who reportedly was cured after receiving a bone marrow transplant from a genetically resistant donor.

Caution

Some experts believe it is still necessary to look at treatment outcomes with caution, and wait longer to see how the girl's body reacts over time. Although the infection is no longer detected in the child's blood, it is possible that the liver or lymph nodes are still infected, for example.

Researchers also need to determine if treatment works effectively in other children to determine if it is not just an isolated case. Either way, curing the baby can mean new hope for HIV-positive children, as well as changing the way infected mothers who give birth to babies with HIV around the world are treated.