Act fast against HIV

GET them started early. A second baby has been cleared of HIV, almost a year after a similar success in Mississippi. The baby remains on anti-HIV drugs, but blood tests no longer detect virus particles capable of replicating. When newborn babies are suspected to be infected with  HIV from their mother, standard practice is not to treat them until they are weeks old, when the infection can be confirmed. In this case Audra Deveikis of the Miller Children’s Hospital in Long Beach, California, started the baby on antiretrovirals four hours after birth. Later tests showed that  the infant – now 9 months old – had indeed been infected, the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Boston heard last week. It is not the first time early treatment has paid off. The Mississippi baby was given drugs 30 hours after birth, and has now been off medication for 10 months. Fourteen adults treated in France between 35 days and 10 weeks after infection – much earlier than usual – have stopped medication for an average of seven years and remain virus-free.