“Early Treatment Is Found to Clear H.I.V. in a 2nd Baby”

This article exposes two newborn babies who were treated for H.I.V. within 30 hours of being born and have showed signs that they do not contain the virus after months of treatment. Last year, scientists made a stunning announcement that a baby born with H.I.V. had apparently been cured through intense treatment directly after birth. After this case was made public, there was a great deal of skepticism. Although there has not been an actual trial to prove that scientists have found a cure for babies, this child is now 3 years old and is still virus-free. Also, there was a woman in California who had advanced AIDS and she gave birth to a baby girl who also carried this infection. However, four hours after this baby was born, she was immediately put on three different drugs at the high doses usually used for treatment of the virus. Although this baby is also free of AIDS, doctors still claim that it is incorrect to describe the baby as “cured” because she is still on drugs. But because the most sensitive blood tests can find no virus capable of replicating, she describes the baby as “having sero-reverted to H.I.V.-negative.” Scientists are still continuing to test infected babies, and their next plan is to figure out when it is safe to stop giving the patients their treatment. I found this article to be very eye opening. After visiting Kenya two years ago, I became well aware of this topic because infectious diseases are very prevalent in Africa. At the time there had not been any public breakthroughs in regards to cures, so it was a very depressing thing to learn about. However, after reading this article, I can see that we are moving in the right direction. The H.I.V. virus is very dangerous and if we can focus on preventing it from spreading to babies, we will see a huge decline in the numbers of those who are infected. Although this article was interesting and informative, it was broken up in such a way that made it difficult to fully understand after reading it one time through. It kept going back and forth between the two babies that were treated for H.I.V. and the work that researchers will do in order to move forward with this process. The writing didn’t really flow, so I had to keep going back and re-read the information again and again. posted for P. Marshall