On Monday 4 March, the world awoke to a media storm: news was buzzing around the world that a Mississippi baby had been cured of HIV.
We were soon bombarded with a flurry of media reports about how this case was set to change the HIV treatment paradigm, prevent babies from being infected, and, to quote the principal author of the study, Dr Deborah Persaud, “transform our current treatment practices in newborns worldwide”.
I’m currently in Atlanta in the USA, where this research was presented at the Conference for Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections. The news stations here are already asking if this means that children who are infected at birth can stop their drugs. They’re asking when the cure will be available, and patients have even been calling their paediatricians at this meeting, raising the question of whether their child could also be cured!
To which I say: STOP. Back up. Rewind.
Dr Steve Taylor on the HIV ‘cure’ controversy at Huffington Post UK. Read the whole article here.
