Doctors described the rare HIV case in a presentation to the 2015 worldwide AIDS Society conference in Vancouver, B.C.
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Many doctors believe that the aggressive early treatment decimated the disease, allowing the French girl to naturally keep it in remission. But for now, the reason remains a mystery.
Groundbreaking research conducted at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill has demonstrated that potent drug cocktails can disable HIV to the point that the deadly virus can’t be transmitted to other people through sexual activity.
The unidentified girl was infected at the time of her birth in 1996 because of transmission from her mother, whose HIV was poorly controlled, said Dr. Asier Saez-Cirion of the Pasteur Institute in Paris.
On returning for check-ups one year later, medical teams found undetectable levels of HIV in her blood despite her break from treatment. She’s now a teenager and the virus doesn’t show up in standard tests. “But we still need a lot of work to know why”.
Although several adults have stopped HIV antiretroviral (ARV) medication and remained in remission, French doctors think that this is the first long-lasting case that started in childhood. When these events were combined with the serious AIDS and serious non-AIDS events, as an overall measure of clinical benefit for early treatment, the rate was 18 percent lower in the early treatment group, compared to the deferred treatment group. Analysis of HIV drug resistance in adults receiving early antiretroviral treatment for HIV prevention: results from the HIV Prevention Trials Network (HPTN 052) trial.
“Putting more people on ARVs is actually one of the few ways to start bringing these costs down because of the impact on transmission”, Meyer-Rath said. In recent months, his researchers have been running tests on the young woman to learn what they could about the teen’s condition before making news of her case public. But children at risk of infection from their mothers can be identified – and treated — during pregnancy, or at birth.
“Most likely she has been in virological remission for so long because she received a combination of antiretrovirals very soon after infection”, said the report.
As for the French teenager, “it’s just too early, and the laboratory data is too sparse, to really figure out what is going on”, Greene said. Then the regimen will be interrupted to see when or if the virus returns. Those things suggest that early treatment is responsible for the remission, he said.
The virus has been at levels so low it could not be detected since the girl was 21 months old.
Some 8 000 people with HIV in war-torn eastern Ukraine face a critical shortage of medicine and their supply will run out in mid-August unless a blockade is lifted, a United Nations Aids envoy has warned.
Nobel laureate Francoise Barre-Sinoussi, who helped in the discovery of HIV in 1983, said that from this patient, a lot of knowledge can be extracted and used, that is why this discovery has made everyone excited.
“We are learning from this patient, that’s why it’s so exciting. This is critical if we want to make progress in the field of remission in the future”.
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Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, cautions that HIV researchers have always been disappointed by false hopes.
