In article <kiltyD694KA.9qp at netcom.com> kilty at netcom.com (Kathleen Richards) writes:
>The news is reporting a child born of a mother dying of AIDS,
>born HIV positive but now showing clear of the virus some 5
>years later. It was spoken of as "the first documented case of
>a human being clearing itself of the viral infection of HIV".
I just saw that article, in the New England Journal of Medicine.
It looks moderately convincing. The child is now 5 yr old, and no HIV
has been detected for several years. The child was apparently infected
at birth, and there were a couple of positive cultures and positive PCR
tests in the first year, pulling out the same HIV isolate. The long
interval of HIV -ve status suggests that the child really is free,
although they note that they can't be sure that there isn't some virus
hiding out in lymph nodes etc. The biggest question seems to be whether
the child was really infected originally, and the multiple isolations of
the same variant suggest that that was real, although again we can't rule
out a weird repeated contamination or something like that - it seems
unlikely, though.
There was nothing particularly unusual noted about the child, so
they have no suggestions as to how the virus was cleared.
Ian
--
Ian York (york at mbcrr.harvard.edu)
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, 44 Binney St., Boston MA 02115
Phone (617)-632-3921 Fax (617)-632-2627
