Today is a wonderful day: the sun is shining, everyone at DAA is happy, but more importantly there were 2 big breakthroughs in the area of HIV.  First of all, a team from The Alfred hospital of Melbourne found the hiding place of the HIV virus and they found a way to wake it up so it can be destroyed.  Off course this doesn’t mean that everyone can go around and have unprotected sex now. They found a way to wake up the virus but they still have to find ways to get rid of the infected cells.
 

And if that wasn’t enough, in Mississippi, there was a child cured of HIV, as you can read in Ninettes blog here. The child was born with the HIV virus, immediately after it was born it was put on a course of 3 antiretroviral drugs. They used this aggressive treatment because the mother wasn’t treated during the pregnancy. After a few months of treatment, the levels of HIV in the baby’s blood were undetectable by lab tests. For 18 months the mother and baby regularly came to the hospital for the treatment but after this these visits stopped. About five months later they went back to the hospital, the doctors were convinced that, after not receiving treatment for 5 months, the virus would be returned. But surprisingly every test came back negative.  It is still unclear why the treatment worked, but this shows that there’s hope in eradicating the virus among newborns.
 

So let’s end this day with a big smile and hope that the day they find a real cure for HIV is nearby!
 

Read more about it here and here.