Study on Babies With HIV Suggests Early Treatment May Slow Virus

Another AIDS study has confirmed something about babies that doctors already knew about adults: the more HIV there is in the blood, the faster the deadly disease appears. In tests on 106 newborns infected with HIV, a research team led by Dr. William Shearer of the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston found that babies with the highest levels of HIV were at a greater risk of quickly developing one of the immunity-related diseases that are the hallmarks of AIDS.

Their findings, published in the May 8 New England Journal of Medicine, raise the possibility that early treatment with new triple-drug therapies may slow or prevent the development of AIDS in infants. In particular, they found that blood levels of the virus were low immediately after birth, suggesting that infection had just occurred.