Mississippi doctors “functionally cure” a toddler of HIV

Mississippi doctors are reporting they have "functionally cured" a two-year-old child of HIV, according to findings presented at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) today. "Functionally cured" in this scenario means the child is now without detectable levels of virus and has not demonstrated any signs of the disease after 10 months without antiretroviral therapy. It's the first well-documented case of such results in an infant and only the second person overall documented with a cure. The first occurred in 2012 as Timothy Brown, later known as "the Berlin Patient," was cured through a bone marrow stem transplant.

Research on the case is still on going, and it has not yet been determined whether these results can be replicated in clinical trials with other HIV-exposed children. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD)—both components of the National Institutes of Health—provided funding to support the analysis presented at CROI. The child remains under the medical care of Hannah Gay, M.D., a pediatric HIV specialist at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson.

When the child came back and showed no signs of HIV, Gay even thought it was a mistake. “My first thought was, ‘oh my goodness. We have been treating an uninfected child,” she told NBC News. "But I checked the records which confirmed she was, in fact, infected.”