Last week another major victory was won in the fight against HIV and AIDS.
A two-year-old girl
from Mississippi was declared "functionally cured" of the Human
Immunodeficiency Virus, the infectant that causes the deadly Acquired
Immunodeficiency Syndrome. She is only the second person ever to be
considered cured of the disease.
The girl was born
HIV-positive, contracting the virus from her mother. News reports state
that doctors discovered her mother was infected only shortly before the
baby girl's birth. A combination of three different HIV drugs, called
antiretroviral therapy or ART, was given to the infant when she was only
30 hours old, in the hopes of arresting the virus' growth, to prevent
it from becoming AIDS.
Within a month of
treatment, tests showed that the virus in the baby's blood had decreased
until it was undetectable. Now, two years later, there is still no
detectable sign of HIV in her blood. Her remarkable case was presented
by doctors at the 2013 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic
Infections in Atlanta, Georgia. She has given health researchers hope
that if infected babies are treated early enough with effective doses,
they can be cured, and will not have to live the rest of their lives on
treatment.
The toddler is the
second person freed of HIV after the famous "Berlin patient," Timothy
Ray Brown, was also declared cured in 2011. Brown, a 40-year-old
HIV-positive man, had been diagnosed with leukemia in 2007. He received a
stem cell transplant from a donor's bone marrow, selected for genetic
compatibility but who also has a rare immunity to HIV.
Studies revealed in
the late 1990s that about one per cent of people of northern European
ethnicity are totally immune to the virus. Their immunity was found to
be due to a rare genetic mutation that creates a protective barrier for
cells in the body. Two copies of the rare gene are required for total
immunity. Somewhat more common among northern Europeans is to have one
copy of the gene mutation, found in about 11 per cent of Caucasians,
making them more resistant, though not immune, to infection.
Today, Brown has no
detectable HIV, though the effects of his leukemia have affected him and
he has trouble walking. But his case gives hope that stem cells from
genetically immune donors can lead to a cure for most, if not all,
people.
Even though most of us
may never put ourselves at risk of acquiring HIV or AIDS, the impact of
the virus on the whole world cannot be underestimated. Uganda's ABC
model has proven the most successful preventative method: Abstinence
first, Be faithful to your spouse, and only as a last resort use a
Condom; but much of sub-Saharan Africa continues to suffer with
prevalence rates over 20 per cent in some countries.
While AIDS is
relatively uncommon in Alberta and Canada — statistics from 2009 found
about 1,462 people in this province living with the disease — medical
advances like these are an important sign of hope for humanity.
