A baby thought to have been “cured” of HIV last year has now been diagnosed with the virus.

After being born to a mother with HIV, a baby in Mississippi was pre-emptively treated with three antiretroviral drugs for 18 months. Doctors lost track of the infant until she was brought to a clinic for a routine appointment after 10 months of receiving no HIV medication, in March last year. The team involved found no evidence of the virus in her blood, and declared the girl “functionally cured”.

Now, however, the virus has returned. The child, now nearly 4, was recently found to have high levels of HIV in her blood during a routine visit to the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, where she was originally discovered to be HIV-negative. Decreased levels of CD4+ cells, the white blood cells targeted by HIV, along with the appearance of antibodies against the virus in her blood, suggest that her remission had come to an end, and that traces of virus remaining in her body had escaped from immune control.

Hiding virus

Most HIV patients need to take antiretroviral drugs daily over the course of their lives, because the virus can hide away in tissues such as lymphoid and gut cells. Medicines can only reach the virus in the blood, and if therapy is halted, the virus can emerge and relaunch its attack.


The secret to the baby’s remission seemed to be starting antiretroviral therapy just 30 hours after her birth. In the weeks following the announcement of her “cure”, reports emerged of adults who were also HIV-negative after having received rapid treatment following infection.

Although the news of the baby’s reinfection is disappointing, it’s not that surprising, says Asier Sáez-Cirión of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, France, who last year reported that a group of 14 men known as the Visconti cohort were in remission without needing antiretroviral drugs. “The baby was in remission of infection and was not cured, because traces of the virus were found several times in her cells,” says Sáez-Cirión.

“Unfortunately, the equilibrium between the mechanisms controlling the infection and the virus tilted, and the baby could not control it anymore,” says Sáez-Cirión. This shows us that even if reducing the amount of virus is important, he says, there are other factors that keep the virus controlled and we need to identify them.

Flush it out

“The case of the Mississippi child indicates that early antiretroviral treatment… did not completely eliminate the reservoir of HIV-infected cells, but may have considerably limited its development and averted the need for antiretroviral medication over a considerable period,” says Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland. “Now we must direct our attention to understanding why that is, and determining whether the period of sustained remission in the absence of therapy can be prolonged even further.”

The report of the baby’s relapse follows other similar news. Last March, two men in Boston were considered “cured”, but were later found to have relapsed.

Research this year in monkeys showed that the earlier that drugs are given, the easier it is for the body to keep the virus in check. But the early treatment didn’t completely eliminate the virus.

The biggest hope for tackling the problem is to find drugs that flush latent HIV out of its hiding places in the body, so all the virus can be eliminated, effectively curing the patient so they don’t have to take more antiviral drugs.

Several such drugs are under development, including one called panobinostat, which has showed some promise in early trials.