In A Nutshell
In slightly underreported news, doctors are now saying that HIV can be functionally cured with early enough detection. In early 2013, doctors announced that a two-year-old child had been cured of the deadly infection.
The Whole Bushel
In early 2013, a small French study of 14 HIV patients reached an astonishing conclusion that somehow didn’t get much attention in the news at the time. It appears that, if treated with certain modern anti-viral medications within 10 weeks of infection, the disease can be effectively cured. Yes, HIV—the dreaded death sentence that still kills around two million people per year.
The testing group was given a three-year course of treatment and then simply stopped taking the medications. After about another 7.5 years with no further drug treatment, the virus had not returned to detectable levels.
And in the same month of the same year in the US, doctors reported that a two-year-old Mississippi girl was cured of the virus. Born to a mother who tested positive for HIV upon admission to the hospital, doctors began administering drugs the day after birth; when the child was 18 months old, she and her mother disappeared from the radar of medical professionals for about five months, during which time she was given no medication—yet the virus had not returned.
Of course, these cases don’t represent an immediate cure for the more than 30 million worldwide infected with HIV/AIDS. But they do offer hope that the deadliest, most feared disease of modern times could be halted in the foreseeable future.
Show Me The Proof
Doctors report first cure of HIV in a child
Early detection could lead to ‘functional cure’ of HIV: study