"Last week, a baby was reported to have been 'functionally cured' of HIV after receiving a three-drug regime of ARVs almost immediately after birth."
I'm curious about the qualifier "functionally cured" and what this means exactly.
The basic idea I gather from the article is that unusually early drug treatments have been found to 'cure' people of HIV in this way, where they no longer need drug treatments.
>The 14 adults still have traces of HIV in their blood, but at such low levels that their body can naturally keep it in check without drugs.
They still have HIV, and it may develop into AIDS again later. They can also still spread it, since they do have it in their system. They just don't have enough of it to cause them problems.
With the baby there supposedly aren't any traces, but it's perfectly possible that there are still packets of the virus present. There is no definitive way to know the virus is completely gone and won't come back later.
So they feel great, don't need medical treatment, but can still spread it to others... so great, maybe here we go with AIDS becoming as common as the flu (and mutating more, and killing poor people who can't afford the expensive therapies)
Is there a reason why you think that? It will probably still be sexually transmitted (so it can be avoided more easily than the flu), and it already has a much worse impact on poorer communities. Also, you are assuming that the treatment will remain expensive forever and that there won't be any preventative treatments available in the future.
Perhaps he is thinking of Gibsons's Bridge trilogy. There AIDS is cured by finding a variant of HIV which does not cause the disease. And at least in one scene it is implied that infection with the harmless variant is a usual prerequisite for casual sex.
"Curing" is proving a negative, it's hard, especially with a disease that has a long period of dormancy. Saying "they will never develop AIDS through their natural lifetime" would require waiting for a natural lifetime, which is rather a while. But we have a lot of technology that is capable of measuring viral load and so we can say that someone appears to be cured in that they do not show any viral activity over a significant period of time.
Lets use cancer terminology. The people's HIV is in remission. As with cancer, you can treat it to the point that its undetectable by current tests. Since a doctor may not be able to guarantee your cancer has been completely obliterated (all cancerous cells destroyed), you are in remission. I would look at this in the same way.
It means they can't detect any HIV on repeated tests, but they don't know exactly what's going on so they're hedging in case they've overlooked something.
With the baby actually, from the NPR interview I listened to was that medication was given late. The mother did not know she was HIV positive until she was about to deliver so the preventative? medication wasn't given. Following that she was given very high dosage.
That baby may be actually cured because treatment may have started before the virus could establish a reservoir.
The older people have just had their infection knocked down to a very low level. In theory you can be cured if you're treated as soon as you're exposed to the virus, but it's very, very rare that people know they've been exposed.
I'm curious about the qualifier "functionally cured" and what this means exactly.
The basic idea I gather from the article is that unusually early drug treatments have been found to 'cure' people of HIV in this way, where they no longer need drug treatments.