For years, flip Golder has been particularly madrassa of charming idea: Looking for HIV treatment, can children have answers?
In the mid -2010’s, Oxford specialist and immunologist University began working with scientists in the South African province of Cozo Natal, aimed at tracing several hundred children who obtained HIV from their mothers during pregnancy, childbirth or breastfeeding.
After putting children on anti -drug drugs early in their lives to control the virus, Golder and his associates wanted to monitor their progress and adhere to standard anti -arterial treatment, which prevents HIV from copying. But in the next decade, something unusual occurred. Five children stopped coming to the clinic to collect their medicines, and when the team finally traced them several months later, they appeared in perfect health.
Golder says, “Instead of their viral burden from the ceiling, they were unidentified.” And usually within two or three weeks, HIV began to return. “
In a study published last year, Golder said how for some time, despite not receiving regular anti -arterial medicines, for 17 months, for 17 months, how he remained in apology. In a decades long search for HIV treatment, it offered a controversial insight: that the first extended success in treating HIV may not be in adults, but in children.
In mid -July, at the recent International AIDS Society Conference in Kagali, Rwanda, a pediatrician at Madrid’s Infanta Sofia University Hospital presented a new study, saying that in the first six months of his life, 5 % of the affected people suffer from HIV. “There are special immunological properties in children, which makes it more likely that we will develop an HIV treatment for them before the second population,” says Tigro.
Her ideas resonant by another doctor, Mark Cotton, who directs the clinical research unit of infectious diseases at the University of Stelon Bush, Cape Town.
Cotton says “children have a more dynamic immune system.” They have no additional problems like hypertension or kidney problems. It initially, for treatment, makes them a better target. “
According to Tagaro, HIV children have long been “left behind” in the race to find a treatment that can permanently pardon HIV positive people. Since 2007, it is thought that 10 adults have been treated, which has obtained a steam cell transplant for blood treatment for cancerous treatment, which is a procedure that eliminated the virus. Still, such procedures are complex and extremely dangerous – other patients have died as a result of similar efforts. It is not considered to be a viable strategy, especially to target HIV.
Instead, like a golder, children’s experts have also seen that after starting anti -treatment in early life, a small sub -population of children is successful in suppressing HIV with months, years and even permanently, even permanently. The feeling began initially with some isolated case studies: “Mississippi Baby”, which controlled the virus for more than two years without any medication, and a South African baby who was potentially treated, which had kept the virus in forgiveness for more than a decade. Cotton says he suspects that between 10 and 20 % of all HIV -infected children will be able to control the virus for a significant period, usually two to three weeks, after being stopped.
