The first extensive treatment for HIV can be in children

Years, Philip Golder had an obsessive -compulsive idea with a special idea: in hunting a HIV treatment, can children maintain answers?

With the start of mid-2010, the Oxford University Specialist and authors, with the aim of tracking several hundred children who had acquired HIV from their mothers, began working with scientists in South Africa during pregnancy, childish, or lactation.

Golder and his colleagues were eager to control the advancement and adherence to standard antiviral treatment after putting children on antiviral drugs early in their lives to control the virus, which prevents HIV repeat. But over the next decade, something unusual has happened. Five children stopped to collect their drugs to the clinic, and when the team finally tracked them months later, they appear to be in good health.

“Instead of their viral loads from the roof, they were irrelevant,” says Golder. “And normally HIV is re -dumped within two or three weeks.”

In a study published last year, Golder explained how all five remain in the recovery, although they did not receive regular antiviral drugs for a while and in one case up to 17 months. In decades of searching for HIV treatment, this interesting insight offers: The first extensive success in HIV treatment may be in adults but in children.

At a recent AIDS conference held in mid -July in Kigali, Rwanda, in mid -July, Alfredo Tagaro, a pediatrician at the Infanta Sofia University Hospital in Madrid, presented a new study showing about 5 % of HIV infested children in the first six months of their life. Do. “Children have specific safety properties that make us treat HIV for them before the other population,” says Tagro.

His thoughts were repeated by another physician, Mark Cotton, who guided the clinical research unit of infectious diseases of children at the University of Stelenbus, Cape Town.

“Kids have a much more dynamic immune system,” Cotton says. “They also have no additional problems such as hypertension or kidney problems. This makes them a better goal for a treatment first.”

According to Tagaro, children with HIV have long been “behind” to find a treatment that can permanently improve people with HIV. Since 2007, it is thought that 10 adults have been treated by transplanting stem cells to treat threatened leukemia, the method that was destroyed at the end of the virus. However, with such complex and high -risk procedures – other patients died in similar efforts – this is not a suitable strategy for targeting HIV.

Instead, like Golder, pediatricians have become increasingly aware that after the onset of antiviral treatment early in life, it seems that a small subdivision of children at the time could suppress HIV for months, years, and may be permanently alone with their immune system. The realization initially began with a detached case studies: “Mississippi baby” that controlled the virus for more than two years and a South African child who had kept the virus for more than a decade, seemed to have treated the virus. Cotton says he thinks that between 10 and 20 percent of all HIV infected children are capable of controlling the virus for a considerable period of time, beyond two to three normal weeks, after stopping antivirus.