A small victory in war on HIV-AIDS
As scientists pore over the work of a team of American doctors who cured a child of the dreaded HIV virus, it can be said that science has taken another small step in conquering the AIDS virus. The procedure seemed simple enough: a Mississippi girl HIV-positive from birth was put through a strong antiretroviral drugs course from 30 hours after birth. Dr Hannah Gay, who treated her, and Dr Deborah Persaud, an Indian-origin Guyanese pioneer in paediatric research who led the team researching the treatment, are sure to find their place in history even if all that is known now is that the treatment works on children. It is yet to be fully determined if the doctors have found a definitive cure, but if so, they can claim to have taken humanity forward in containing one of the most insidious infections of modern times.
Showing abundant caution, Dr Persaud herself concedes that not all traces of the virus were eradicated and the child was in effect only “functionally cured”. The problem is that this treatment may not work in older people as the virus would already have infected cells in their bodies. Treating HIV women with antiretroviral drugs during pregnancy is common enough these days, an immediate benefit of which is that the number of babies born with the virus has dropped significantly. This is also known to reduce the chances of HIV being transmitted from mother to child to just two per cent.
Research is still at a very nascent stage, so we should be cautious in acknowledging that a fuller breakthrough in finding a cure for full-blown AIDS is far from assured. Only one individual, Timothy Ray Brown of San Francisco, is deemed to have been cured of AIDS; and he had actually undergone bone marrow transplant from a donor naturally resistant to HIV. The world still sees around 300,000 babies born with HIV every year. The current breakthrough might mean that many of them can be cured with a swift, intense and potent dosage in a cocktail of drugs soon after birth instead of being given just one course of the drug, which has been standard medical procedure till now.
What Dr Gay and Dr Persaud and their teams have done is give hope to several hundred thousand innocent babies who may not have escaped transmission of the virus from their mothers. For a country like India, the findings are particularly important. Although there has been a 50 per cent drop in the number of new infections over the past 10 years, the number of children born with HIV in India is still very large, and the new treatment may come in handy to transform their lives.