HIV-infected baby girl is cured

An American girl infected with HIV has been cured, after being treated very early with the current popular drugs.

When the baby girl was born in a rural Mississippi hospital in the United States, the girl's mother was tested positive for the HIV virus. Doctors know that girls are at high risk of HIV infection from their mothers, so they transferred girls to the University of Mississippi Medical Center for treatment.

HIV virus can be completely destroyed by existing drugs.

Here, Dr. Hannah Gay gave the baby girl a combination of three popular anti-HIV drugs when the girl was 30 hours old, before the test results confirmed her HIV-infected girl. After a period of treatment, the girl's immune system has responded positively.

Subsequent test results showed that the level of HIV virus was reduced and disappeared completely when girls were 29 days old. This is the case where the first child infected with HIV is cured. These successful scientists can help find ways to kill the HIV virus in young patients.

"This is evidence that HIV can be cured in children," said Dr Deborah Persaud, a virus researcher at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Scientists will need to conduct more research to see if treatments for girls are equally effective in other HIV-infected children. If successful, this will be a new hope for children infected with this deadly disease.

The case of a Mississippi girl is completely different from Timothy Ray Brown, the first person infected with HIV to be cured. German patients were cured in 2007 with a complex treatment by transplanting human stem cells containing genes that are particularly resistant to HIV.