The First Widespread Cure for HIV Could Be in Children

For years, Philip Golddar is obsessed with a special fascinating concept: can children hold the answers in search of HIV cure?

Starting from the mid-20’s, Pediatrician University in Oxford and the immunologist started working with Quizulu-Natal scientists in South Africa, with the aim of firing more than a hundred children who received HIV from their mothers while breastfeeding.

After putting them in antiratroviral drugs early in their lives to control the virus of children, Golddar and its colleagues were eager to monitor their progress and loyalty to the standard antheretroviral treatment, which prevent HIV from replicating. However, something unusual happened in the next decade. Five children stopped coming to the clinic to collect their drugs, and when the team finally looked for them a few months later, they seemed to be in perfect health.

“Instead of staying through their viral burden, they were explored,” Golder said. “And usually HIV returns within two or three weeks.”

A The study published last yearGolder described how five people had regularly forgiven five people, not getting antiratroviral drugs and in one case, not getting up to 17 months. In search of HIV cure for decades, it gives a significant insight: The first broad success in healing HIV may not come into adults, but in children.

At the recent International AIDS Society Conference in Kigali, Rwanda, in mid-July, Alfredo Tagaro, a pediatrician at Infanta Sofia University Hospital in Madrid, showed that about five percent of HIV-suffered children were found in the first six months of life. “Children have special immunological properties that make it even more likely that we will develop an HIV healing for them before other people,” said Tagaro.

His thoughts were echoed by another doctor Mark Cotton, who directed the infectious disease clinical research unit at the Children University of Stecenobosh at Cape Town.

Cotton said, “Children have a much more dynamic prevention system.” They have no additional problems like high blood pressure or kidney problems. It makes them better not to cure them. “

According to Tagaro, HIV-infected children have a “back” in the competition to find a treatment for a long time that can permanently forgive HIV-positive persons. Since the year 20 2007, 10 adults are believed to have been healing, getting a stem cell transplant for the treatment of life-threatening blood cancer, which is a method that removed the virus. Nevertheless, these national methods are both complex and extremely risky – other patients died after the same kind of effort – it is not considered an effective strategy for specially targeting HIV.

Instead, as goldser, pediatricians have grown in the beginning that after starting anterretroviral treatment early in life, a small sub -population of children then seems to be able to suppress HIV permanently with months, years and probably their resistance. This perception initially started with some isolated case study: “Mississippi Baby” Who has controlled Virus for more than two years without drugs and a child in South Africa who was considered Healing of potential For more than a decade, he has forgiven the virus. Cotton states that he suspects that all HIV -infected children will be able to control the virus for a significant time outside the normal two to three weeks after closing the antheretrovirals between 10 and 20 percent of children.