A South African girl born to an HIV-infected mother has been successfully fighting the immunodeficiency virus for eight years without taking antiretroviral drugs, according to an article accepted for publication in the Lancet.
“Such cases are extremely rare. Studying them, we are looking for ways to completely rid patients of infection. It seems to me that taking antiviral drugs at an early age helped the girl's immunity to suppress the virus, and now we need to understand how she differs from other patients,”said Avi Vioari of the University of the Witwatersrand, speaking at the International AIDS Society conference in Paris.
Over the past few years, physicians and virologists have encountered several cases where the body suppressed HIV for an unusually long time or got rid of the virus forever or indefinitely.
As a rule, always, except in the case of the so-called Berlin patient, the viral particles still remained in the patient's body, but either they were unable to multiply, or behaved quite "quietly" for several years. For example, a so-called Mississippi child lived for about five years before reappearing signs of infection.
A nine-year-old girl from South Africa, who has acquired long-term resistance to the immunodeficiency virus thanks to the use of the latest antiretroviral drugs since the day of her birth, has added to the treasury of such rare cases.
As Violari notes, the girl and her mother participated in a special CHER program, in which scientists tested the popular idea of how to block the development of HIV. It lies in the fact that taking antiretroviral drugs in the early stages of infection can give a child's body time to adapt to HIV and begin to fight it before it depletes the immune system.
Under this program, children received large doses of antiretroviral drugs from the first month of life for 40 weeks, after which the scientists stopped therapy and watched to see if the infection returned.
In general, this approach has been quite successful. The early therapy slowed the infection down and gave most children two years of life without having to take these drugs all the time. Ten babies were even more fortunate, and the level of infection in their bodies remains extremely low to this day.
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And in one case, according to Violari, her nine-year-old patient was able to completely get rid of the virus. According to her, there are no full-fledged HIV particles in the girl's blood, although fragments of the virus are still present in the cells. At the same time, they do not reproduce, and scientists hope that this situation will not change in the future, and that the girl from South Africa will not suffer the fate of a child from Mississippi.
Even if this happens, scientists will still consider such an achievement a big step forward in the fight against HIV, as it shows that the strategy of "early warning" infection works and in some cases allows you to postpone the time of its development for a very long time. It is possible that in the future it will allow either to suppress HIV permanently, or to make its development extremely slow.