Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Media frenzy continues. I have now gone over the data from the Hannah Gay and Persaud presentation at CROI and I have some doubts that the child was ever truly infected in the first place. Tough to really tell whether the virus that was detected and ultimately disappeared on ARVs was the virus from the mother or really infected baby cells making virus. The authors claim that the 2 phase decay of virus on ARVs is characteristic of the response to active virus replication. Cliff Lane pointed out that the decay curve has very few points and is also compatible with a single phase decay. In any event, I have been taking the conservative approach of emphasizing that this is just a single case and it needs to be replicated and validated and importantly, it has little to do with infection in the adult where reservoirs are firmly established prior to the start of ARVs. Nonetheless, the media frenzy continues with interview for Men’s health, Huffington Post, NPR- San Francisco (KQED), Boston Globe.