Health & Science

A newborn cured of HIV; Communicating by thought; Why pessimists live longer; Two tickets to Mars

A newborn cured of HIV

Doctors in Mississippi appear to have cured a baby girl of an HIV infection—a breakthrough that researchers hope to replicate for the sake of other infected children. Within 30 hours of being born in a rural hospital, the infant tested positive for the virus, and doctors immediately began treating her with an aggressive regimen of conventional anti-retroviral drugs. Infected babies typically have to take such drugs indefinitely to keep the virus in check, but after 18 months, the mother disappeared with her daughter and stopped giving her the medicine. The doctors located the girl again several months later and, fearing the worst, ordered up ultrasensitive blood tests. “When all those came back negative, I knew something odd was afoot,” Hannah Gay, the child’s pediatrician, told NPR.org. Katherine Luzuriaga, a pediatric AIDS expert at the University of Massachusetts, thinks Gay’s early and aggressive treatment “curtailed the formation of viral reservoirs” in the girl’s body. The girl, now 2 and a half years old, is only the second person known to have been cured of the disease; the other was an adult male who received a bone-marrow transplant from an HIV-resistant donor. Worldwide, some 300,000 HIV-positive babies are born every year.

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