Is Functional Cure Effective for HIV Infection?

HIV infection can be treated in two ways: Therapy may eliminate all of the body’s HIV, or remove much of the HIV leaving some residual virus that does not cause disease. The latter is called a “functional cure” and a functionally cured infant was documented by researchers presenting at the 20th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI). 

The baby was born prematurely and diagnosed with HIV virus-positive. At the age of 30 hours, physicians at the University of Mississippi Medical Center promptly administered comprehensive antiretroviral therapy ( ART), which decreased the virus to levels that could only be identified by ultrasensitive tests at 29 days. Treatment continued until the child was lost to follow-up 18 months and ART stopped. Unforeseen, when the infant returned to the clinic later at 2 years of age, repeated tests revealed only undetectable or minute levels of HIV in the body.

The problem that comes to mind immediately is whether the baby was truly infected with HIV, or whether the virus was merely transmitted from mother to child but was not necessarily developed in the baby. Other reports have been issued of this phenomenon. In this scenario, antiretroviral therapy should have been working in a preventive rather than a curative way.

Nevertheless, according to the research published, at various times and on different samples, the child tested positive for HIV virus suggesting that the virus had developed itself and the baby was indeed infected. Another way to treat HIV infection medication such as Tenvir is used to treat HIV infection and chronic hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection in combination with other anti-HIV medicines. It prevents the multiplication of viruses in human cells. This stops the virus from producing new viruses and clears up your infection.

Since HIV establishes a reservoir of persistently infected cells in the earliest stages of infection, there is increasing interest in the idea of early intensive antiretroviral therapy to reduce the size of this reservoir and as such result in a functional cure. Since babies are most commonly infected during the final phases of pregnancy or during childbirth, they pose an ideal situation for preventing or reducing the HIV reservoir. In a way, the Mississippi baby case was an unplanned experiment as the child received early care and stopped at 18 months.

This opens opportunities for more study into controlled clinical trials to eliminate the 1000 regular HIV infections that still occur in infants worldwide. When purchasing medicine online, we recommend safe healths pharmacy it is a trusted online pharmacy.