Yeah. I’ll be keeping an eye out for this to make it into PubMed or MMWR. I really would like to see the details.
So then she repeated testing, thinking something was wrong with the lab test. And it was negative again. At that point in time, she called me because we've worked together as colleagues intermittently since the mid-1990s, caring for HIV-positive kids and doing clinical trials through the NIH-sponsored clinical trials group. When she told me about this, we thought this was quite unusual and so we assembled a team of individuals and went on to do some very specialized research to see exactly how much virus there was in the baby's system and what form it was in. Using those very sensitive tests, we were able to detect occasionally very, very low levels of the viral nucleic acids.
One of the doctors developed a very sensitive culture technique to see whether she can actually grow virus from people's cells. She tried to do that from the baby but she was unable to recover the virus. Then I did immunologic studies, and the kind of the immune repercussions that we usually see in HIV-positive individuals were not there. We retested the baby through 28 months, and the baby has continued to control the virus. In other words, we do not see the viral load coming back in the absence of treatment.
NEWSHOUR: But there are still low levels of the virus in the baby's system?
DR. LUZURIAGA: Yes, but we're not quite sure what it means. These are very low levels of virus that are around and we don't know whether these are false positives or whether they truly constitute viral load but it's just so low that it's tough to detect.
So then she repeated testing, thinking something was wrong with the lab test. And it was negative again. At that point in time, she called me because we've worked together as colleagues intermittently since the mid-1990s, caring for HIV-positive kids and doing clinical trials through the NIH-sponsored clinical trials group. When she told me about this, we thought this was quite unusual and so we assembled a team of individuals and went on to do some very specialized research to see exactly how much virus there was in the baby's system and what form it was in. Using those very sensitive tests, we were able to detect occasionally very, very low levels of the viral nucleic acids.
One of the doctors developed a very sensitive culture technique to see whether she can actually grow virus from people's cells. She tried to do that from the baby but she was unable to recover the virus. Then I did immunologic studies, and the kind of the immune repercussions that we usually see in HIV-positive individuals were not there. We retested the baby through 28 months, and the baby has continued to control the virus. In other words, we do not see the viral load coming back in the absence of treatment.
NEWSHOUR: But there are still low levels of the virus in the baby's system?
DR. LUZURIAGA: Yes, but we're not quite sure what it means. These are very low levels of virus that are around and we don't know whether these are false positives or whether they truly constitute viral load but it's just so low that it's tough to detect.