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HIV, which is known to affect more than 36.7 million people worldwide, is one of the deadliest viruses around today — since it was discovered, it’s taken the lives of more than 35 million victims, according to the WHO. This South African case, however, is a glimmer of hope.

The case is that of a nine-year-old South African child who was infected with HIV at birth, now being presented at the on-going Paris conference of the International AIDS Society (IAS).

The child, after receiving a burst of treatment soon after being born, has since been free of any symptoms or active signs of the menacing virus without any further treatment, reigniting confidence that rare cases such as these hold clues that can lead to the creation of a vaccine for the decades-long epidemic.

“[T]his new case strengthens our hope that by treating HIV-infected children for a brief period beginning in infancy, we may be able to spare them the burden of lifelong therapy and the health consequences of long-term immune activation typically associated with HIV disease,” Anthony Fauci, director National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) said.

The apparently healthy nine-year-old child is one of only three — out of millions of HIV-positive children worldwide — whose body chemistry, assisted by an early treatment regimen, naturally stops

the virus in its tracks.

Although researchers did find HIV in some of the girl’s immune cells, the virus did not appear to be capable of replicating. “To our knowledge, this is the first reported case of sustained control of HIV in a child enrolled in a randomized trial of ART interruption following treatment early in infancy,” Avy Violari, a scientist at the Perinatal HIV Research Unit of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, said when presenting the case.

The child was born to an HIV-positive mother and was taken to one of the clinics at about eight weeks of age. The therapy was initiated when the viral load was much lower, and it was continued until 48 weeks. Even after a year, the child showed no signs of actively replicating virus. This is the first such case of sustained virological treatment.

The case resembles that of the “Mississippi baby”, a child in the US who was infected at birth in 2010 and treated until she was 18 months old. When the baby was tested an year later, without treatment or drugs, she had undetectable levels of HIV virus and doctors thought she may have been cured. However, in July 2014, they announced the virus had re-emerged.

This is the third case of a HIV child remaining healthy for some time without treatment. Two years ago, researchers reported on a French child who was born with HIV in 1996 and was given treatment at the age of three months. The treatment was stopped sometime between the age of five and seven. The child was still healthy and without measurable HIV virus more than 11 years later.

“We don’t believe that antiretroviral therapy alone can lead to remission,” Avy Violari, pediatric research head at the Perinal HIV Research Unit in Johannesburg, said. “We don’t really know what’s the reason why this child has achieved remission — we believe it’s either genetic or immune system-related.”

“By further studying the child, we may expand our understanding of how the immune system controls HIV replication,” said Caroline Tiemessen from the National Institute of Communicable Diseases (NICD) in Johannesburg. Reiterating how there is still much to learn about the effects of starting and then stopping drug treatment in children with HIV.

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