A Mississippi girl born with HIV and was previously thought to have been cured is now showing signs of the infection despite a two-year remission.
The medical community was disappointed as this turn will heavily affect a federal study focusing on starting early treatment for people born with HIV.
"We're going to take a good hard look at the study and see if it needs any modifications," said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease said to Businessweek. The modifications could either focus on the duration of the treatment.
The doctors started treating the girl when she was only 18 months old. The treatment stopped abruptly when the doctors weren't able to contact the mother. Five months later, the mother returned the baby to the doctors and analysis showed that her blood was clear of infection even if she missed her medication. This surprised the doctors as they expected the relapse to happen in weeks of no medication, USA Today reported.
Now that she is four years old, her blood samples showed signs of the infections again, and her doctors were clueless how it happened.
The case of this girl showed that early and aggressive treatment might not be that useful at all as it only increased the chance of a dormant virus being activated again.
Despite the disappointment of the researchers from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, they tried to be positive as the incident was still able to provide a significant understanding of early HIV treatment.
"The case of the Mississippi child indicates that early antiretroviral treatment in this HIV-infected infant did not completely eliminate the reservoir of HIV-infected cells that was established upon infection but may have considerably limited its development and averted the need for antiretroviral medication over a considerable period," Fauci said in a statement, quoted by TIME.
"Now we must direct our attention to understanding why that is and determining whether the period of sustained remission in the absence of therapy can be prolonged even further," he added.
