Starting in the mid-2010s, the University of Oxford pediatrician and immunologist began working with scientists in the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal, with the aim of tracking several hundred children who had acquired HIV from their mothers, either during pregnancy, childbirth, or breastfeeding.
After putting the children on antiretroviral drugs early in their lives to control the virus, Goulder and his colleagues were keen to monitor their progress and adherence to standard antiretroviral treatment, which stops HIV from replicating. But over the following decade, something unusual happened. Five of the children stopped coming to the clinic to collect their drugs, and when the team eventually tracked them down many months later, they appeared to be in perfect health.
Headline buries the lede. Antiretovirals often do nowadays result in no viral load. But not for people who stopped therapeutics.
Did we read the same article? The point is that for some people it resulted in no viral load even without drugs over a prolonged time.
In a study published last year, Goulder described how all five remained in remission, despite having not received regular antiretroviral medication for some time, and in one case, up to 17 months. In the decadeslong search for an HIV cure, this offered a tantalizing insight: that the first widespread success in curing HIV might not come in adults, but in children.
Instead, like Goulder, pediatricians have increasingly noticed that after starting antiretroviral treatment early in life, a small subpopulation of children then seem able to suppress HIV for months, years, and perhaps even permanently with their immune system alone.
Yes, that is what I read roguetrick as saying. The headline should include the lede “viral load undetectable, even after therapeutics stops”, however, this lede gets buried in the article, instead of highlighted in the headline.
Wouldn’t surprise me if the editor didn’t want to publish the more accurate “viral loads vanish despite stopping antiretroviral drugs” because anti medicine folks would run with it in the wrong direction.
Actually, that’s a very reasonable speculation. I hadn’t thought of that angle.
Ahh okay, the headline implied that for me but you are both correct that it does not outright say so.
Just pasting the relevant bit:
After putting the children on antiretroviral drugs early in their lives to control the virus, Goulder and his colleagues were keen to monitor their progress and adherence to standard antiretroviral treatment, which stops HIV from replicating. But over the following decade, something unusual happened. Five of the children stopped coming to the clinic to collect their drugs, and when the team eventually tracked them down many months later, they appeared to be in perfect health.
“Instead of their viral loads being through the roof, they were undetectable,” says Goulder. “And normally HIV rebounds within two or three weeks.”
